Instead of taking a vacation, Tom Osborne spends his time off outside in the cold directing traffic to the COVID-19 vaccination clinic at the Walla Walla County Fairgrounds.
And Becky Betts works seven days a week, sometimes 15-hour days, to maintain a day job and work many unpaid hours organizing volunteers for each shot clinic.
The pool of local volunteers giving their time to run Walla Walla County’s mass vaccination clinics has grown to about 1,800 people as more and more hear what a great, uplifting experience it is to give back to the community.
It also helps that many have heard you can get vaccinated early, jumping to the emergency worker category, if you do sign up to volunteer, but once people give their time, they come back many times after to be part of the mass vaccination effort.
The clinics are organized by many county stakeholders through a unified emergency command.
Registered nurses, retired doctors and clinicians, students, members of organizations such as local Rotary clubs, employees from Walla Walla County and Providence St. Mary Medical Center and many others are the faces behind an effort that’s administered well over 12,000 doses of the vaccine.
“It’s unusual for our county’s response to completely be supported by a team of volunteers, and if we were Walla Walla’s employer, we would be, at this point, the second- or third-largest employer,” said Betts, who manages the Providence Population Health Department in Walla Walla.
“Most counties are doing it by support of the National Guard or some sort of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) response … So to have a COVID vaccine, mass vaccination clinics completely supported in totality by a local volunteer force is extremely unique but effective.”
Who volunteers?
General volunteers direct traffic, greet people, screen them for COVID-19 symptoms, check people in for their appointments, help people fill out paperwork and translate information or answer questions in Spanish.
Medical volunteers, who are employed or retired clinicians with active licenses, mix and administer the vaccine and watch people in the waiting area for possible reactions after getting the vaccine.
Pharmacists take three-hour shifts because of the detailed work they do to mix the vaccine with saline. Surprisingly, many in the pharmacy section of volunteers are people from the wine industry with active pharmacist licenses, Betts said.
“The people that are drawing the vaccine, the people that are administering the vaccine, they are here unpaid,” Betts said.
She drew from a volunteer list of about 350 volunteers for the first clinic at Walla Walla University Church in January, but the number has rapidly grown since. She hopes the volunteer base, called Walla Walla County Volunteer Corps, will have utility long after COVID-19 is over.
Typically a clinic, which is now staffed with around 310 to 350 people, will administer 1,500 doses.
“We are pouring vaccines into the community because of ... proof of what we’ve been able to do. Because of volunteers,” Betts said.
Vaccine equity
Though the clinic is rapidly vaccinating, they still have challenges in vaccine equity.
Six Spanish translators are at every clinic now, said David Lopez, a lead volunteer and director of the Center of Humanitarian Engagement at Walla Walla University.
He also volunteers his bilingual skills to call people from the Spanish-speaking community and remind them to come back for their second dose and is part of the volunteer coordination team with Betts and Natasha Delano, the Providence Urgent Care manager.
J. Andrew Rodriquez is the former director of Commitment to Community, a Blue Mountain Action Council program building capacity in some of Walla Walla’s low-income, historically marginalized communities, which are often in Latino neighborhoods. He’s also volunteering his bilingual skills to help.
Rodriquez said he went to two vaccine clinics, and he noticed that at the first one, where 1,000 shots were given, hardly any went into the arms of Latinos.
“I was surprised and disturbed,” he said. “The next time I did it (volunteered), I worked at the registration desk. There were a significant number of Latinos that came to the vaccination clinic.”
He said the sudden influx of people from the Latino community was due to the county health department partnering with C2C and BMAC to reach out and get appointments for many people who could not access the internet.
“One of the C2C community workers told me that she thought they had reached about 250 people for that particular clinic, which was about two weeks ago,” he said. “On that day, they administered about 1,500 shots.
“So it was progress, and there’s a lot more progress that needs to be made with vaccine equity.”
Betts said they began targeted efforts and took recommendations from a task force, set up with stakeholders who have ties, to reach the 22% Latino population in the county.
“Vaccine equity is first and foremost on our mind, and it was disheartening to see those first couple clinics where it was just complete Caucasian event participants,” Betts said.
The county started a bilingual phone line to schedule appointments. Volunteers also contact employers with largely Latino workers and communicate closely with Walla Walla’s Family Medical Center.
“I can’t tell you how many phone calls have been made in this effort,” she said.
Ashley Trout started a texting platform specifically for the Latino population where she sends out text messages of upcoming vaccination clinics in Spanish, reaching a wide audience, Betts said.
Rodriquez said the vaccination efforts also need to go where people are, not expect people from underserved communities to find them.
Betts said, “We are in discussions right now to do mobile vaccinations. I think it’s really important for the public to recognize, we are beholden to the Department of Health and Governor Inslee. We cannot advance within those phases until we are told to do so, or we risk vaccine allotment in our own county.
“As soon as we get permission to advance into that next phase, which is essential workers, teachers, agricultural workers, we’re going to go fast, and we know we’re going to need mobile deployment.”
Safe space
On other fronts, the vaccination effort is receiving many compliments for providing mobility assistance, helping people from their car to the clinic doors via golf carts. This non-traditional method was invented after volunteers realized the people they were vaccinating might need more help, Betts said.
“We want to be very thoughtful that this is a safe place … for health and care and happiness,” Betts said.
Playing a part in making that safe space is Kurt Schlicker, a retired anesthesiologist, and his wife, Vicki Ritzinger, a retired operating room nurse. They have volunteered at just about every clinic and have worn many hats.
One of their roles is to watch for reactions to the vaccine after it is administered.
Sometimes the reaction is anxiety-related, Ritzinger said. There are still people who are nervous after the vaccine because of false information they see on the internet, she said, so the couple reassures them that they did the right thing.
“There are going to be people when their body is injected with any substance can have an anaphylactic reaction, so we are watching for that most of all. We’re also going to want to cover any minor reaction that can happen, so not uncommon to see skin soreness or redness at the site, or even a systemic little flush,” Schlicker said. “We’ve seen very, very few reactions.”
In other areas of safety concern, Walla Walla County commissioners approved a new job description for temporary parking/traffic control at the clinics. The county hopes to hire five to six temporary parking assistants to help at ongoing clinics.
Volunteers have made many changes to the events to improve the experience for event participants.
“Dr. (Daniel) Kaminsky, we start every morning with pep talks, and he tells the volunteers, ‘You will save a life today. Your work is saving a life. So when you’re putting an immunization in an arm of someone elderly, that’s really important vital work,’” Betts said.
“We are doing life-saving work here.”
By Chloe LeValley of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin.
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