IOWA CITY, Iowa — University of Iowa Health Care professionals will be some of the first in the state to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
They’re preparing to start administering doses as soon as the week of December 14th.
Right now in the week leading up to it, it’s all about working out logistics and prepping for when distribution needs to be done on a much larger scale for community members.
It's a numbers game for UIHC, dividing up workers and potential vaccine doses.
CEO Suresh Gunesakaran says, “We will only be told one week at a time how many doses we are getting.”
That means the situation is very fluid. If approved by the FDA vaccinations will start on hospital workers as quick as they can get the vaccine doses.
Gunasakaran saying, “We will start 24 hours after receiving it.”
For the first week the hospital expects around 1000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. To put it into perspective there are 18,000 employees total. Around 1,500 to 2,000 fall into that first priority group.
That includes those that are most directly involved in patient care. The individuals working directly with COVID-19 patients are at the very front of the line.
It’s not just health care workers on those COVID-19 floors, however.
Gunasakaran says UIHC follows a team-based approach. “We take a team-based approach so when I say the team I mean the team starting with physicians, mid-level providers, nurses, therapists, all the way down to the housekeepers on that floor.”
The logistics of the process are difficult due to the way the vaccines will come.
Gunasakaran explains, “The way the dosing is packaged there is a tremendous opportunity for wastage.”
The hospital wants to make sure everyone who is scheduled for a vaccine shows up for it because once the doses are thawed there is limited time before it is unusable. UI says it can store over 50,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
Doctor Patricia Winokur was the principal investigator for University of Iowa’s Pfizer clinical trial site.
She says it’s not the storage that the hospital is concerned with; they started planning for that months ago, ordering the necessary freezers to store the Pfizer vaccine at the extreme temperature needed.
“The storage capacity is not going to be the limitation. The limitation is going to be how many we can get.”
The next step is figuring out how to get the vaccine to the general population when the time comes.
Dr. Winokur says it’s all about doing their best to meet people’s every day schedules.
“We need to make getting the vaccine as easy as possible. A lot of these people have busy lives and can't get as much time off as they may want to take care of their vaccine appointments.”
Right now hospital staff are taking things one day at a time. December 10th the FDA will hold a meeting on the Pfizer vaccine. That should determine whether health care systems like UIHC can start administering vaccines to health care workers.
Gunasakaran says for the most part health care workers at the hospital are very excited and willing to get the vaccine first. It’s not required of them, but the hospital will be requiring vaccination status, meaning they must let the hospital know whether or not they have been vaccinated.
To Gunasakaran it’s all about being able to care for the people living in Iowa as we ride out the rest of the pandemic. He believes by vaccinating the health care workers on the front lines it guarantees that without any problems.
“We will have the clinical teams that are necessary to take care of Iowans through the rest of this pandemic.”
The ones that are normally giving the shots, this time receiving them first.