The state’s top doctor had a message this week for his fellow health-care professionals: Get a flu shot!

“As health care workers, we share one of the proudest traditions of all professions: we put our patients’ interests ahead of our own,” state Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines, M.D. said in an open letter this week.

The letter was a gentle reminder that in August, the state adopted a regulation making flu vaccinations mandatory, unless medically contraindicated, for health care workers in hospitals, outpatient clinics and home care services.

Legislation to include nursing home workers has also been proposed.

The new regulation will apply first to the routine annual seasonal influenza vaccine now available. With the recent FDA approval of the vaccine for novel H1N1 flu (“swine flu”), the regulation will also apply to that vaccine, just in time for the second wave of novel H1N1 influenza already returning this fall, Daines said.

Health-care workers have historically low vaccination rates — about 40 to 50 percent of the staff get the shot even in the most vigorous of voluntary programs.

Throughout this fall and winter, more patients than ever may enter our hospitals and clinics without effective influenza immunity.