Our Clinical Informatics team has been very active in supporting COVID-19 vaccination clinics and other community-focused support during the pandemic. We’ll continue to look at ways our caregivers were involved and share their stories from the frontlines of supporting delivering vaccination and other services.
Some of the roles CI caregivers have assisted with across locations have included patient registration, data entry, actual vaccinators, observers, and database cleanup.
Seattle-based senior Clinical Informatics specialist Ruth Welch was one of the caregivers who answered the call to service in our COVID-19 vaccination clinics across our communities.
Ruth’s first COVID-related volunteer experience was at one of vaccination clinics serving our own frontline caregivers in December 2020. She found the experience very satisfying and recalls that “for a brief period of time you have the wonderful opportunity to interact with someone that you probably will never see again. Yet, each of you share a part of yourself. You shared a tear with someone who was crying with joy and relieve for getting vaccinated. Or showing a nursing student how to administer an injection.” This is very much along the lines of our Providence idea of patient care as a “sacred encounter.”
She later supported database efforts, helping the ministry she supports reconcile thousands of incomplete or inconsistent data points that had to be corrected before they could be entered into either the state or caregiver health databases. “If you don’t get the data into the state, it doesn’t count as an immunization given and your supply diminishes. We get very creative in finding the missing data points. There are several state and national databases that can be searched to look for missing data points,” Ruth shares.
One of Ruth’s favorite volunteer experiences has been with the mobile vaccination clinics organized for underserved communities in partnership with community groups.
There is a MASH-type tent that is set up, usually in a parking lot. We set up with immunization stations on one side and the observation area on the other. There is a generator for lighting, the wireless router to provide a connection to enter information into the state database, and one space heater which needs to be turned off when it starts to rain. (And yes, we did have snow flurries one day!) If you get water puddles in the tent, you put an orange cone in the puddle and hope people walk around it. My challenge at every clinic is that you have three minutes to connect with someone that you don’t know, yet they are probably anxious and have other issues they are dealing with. What do you say during that time that puts them at ease or may for a brief moment give them a smile?
Ruth Welch, sr. CI specialist
We want to recognize the following caregivers who provided vaccination clinic volunteer service in recent months:
Sandy Beaudette, Holli Davin, Ashlee Dowling, Jessie Stensgar, Ruth Welch