Now the cross-functional team is working with essential workers and volunteers to distribute the vaccine and it is working, says Elliott, who is responsible for distributing vaccines across the country. In fact, he says a single dose was not wasted.
While Kittitas County has given 53% of its current vaccines, the province has vaccine clinics this week, according to Kittitas Valley Healthcare that deliver a new group of more than 2,000 vaccines. As all the appointments have been made, the country estimates 97% of their doses by the end of this week.
“The infrastructure we have with everyone who communicates, everyone who is willing to be flexible and play the role needed, and an understanding of (incident systems) and emergency operations centers give us the framework to do that,” Elliott said. told CNN.
Fighting fires has brought lessons to the development of vaccines
If you are fighting big fires, you need to act quickly and resources can change quickly, so learning to change plans and stay flexible is part of the job, Elliott said.
“In fires, we get ready, and you build plans around what you have available and what the priorities are,” Elliott said. “Those change almost daily in wildfires because the risks change, the weather changes, all things change, and you get more resources, or that your resources are taken away from you.”
Shifting resources and changing priorities are similar themes when it comes to combating the pandemic.
“The same goes for this Covid,” Elliott said. “We need vaccination in the arms of people, preferably as close to the order of priority as we can get, but it just goes away with vaccination and people who respect the guidelines for public health. And until we get there, the economy continues to to be a wreck and people are going to die. ‘
In the incident, Elliott explained how he and others provide enough guidance and flexibility for teams to make their own decisions. Give them guidelines and let them ‘work inside the fences’, he said.
“We emphasize that you should not repeatedly tell people how to do your job,” Elliott said. “You’re supposed to tell them what the goals are, give them the resources, give them the time frame, and then stay out of their business.”
In fighting fires and Covid-19, Elliott says it is important for local leaders to do what they believe is right for their community. If something does not come out right, you have to be willing to accept the consequences, he said.
“Do not wait until it’s perfect,” Elliott said. “You will not get all your answers, and not every answer to every question. This is the guidance at the local level to take reasonable risks.”
And if possible, you make decisions at the local level, he said. Large jurisdictions are just a ‘series of smaller units’, like hospital districts in a large country, he said.
“I think we need to trust each other a little bit, give each other a little bit of grace and realize that we’re all trying to work on the same thing,” Elliott said. “The more locally you can get the decisions made in the distribution process, the more success you will achieve.”
Although Elliott has achieved success in his country, he does not want people to think that he has all the answers.
“I do not want to sound like we want to make everything out, because we do not,” he said. “Nights do not sleep well.”
How they ‘wasted zero doses’
The province received more than 2,100 doses of the vaccine last week and it has already assigned a person’s name to each of the valuable vials, Elliott said.
It may not sound like much to someone in a big city, but it’s a lot in this country. According to the state’s financial management office, Kittitas County in Central Washington has 48,140 residents.
“We have distributed more than 95% for the vaccine we have received so far this week,” Elliott said last week. “Because we only received a large amount of vaccine, we will be back more than 95% after Friday of next week. If I say 95%, is the vaccine in people’s arms, or do people have a difficult appointment with their appointment? is because you have to space the first and second dose. ‘
Kasey Knutson, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Health in Kittitas County, let the public know when the vaccine arrives, who is eligible based on the current vaccination phase and how to get appointments. She is also responsible for helping volunteers with distribution.
Elliott set up 102 teachers on short notice to come in and be vaccinated.
The multifunctional team identified teachers, who are in vaccination phase 1B, as a group that could respond quickly, Knutson said. The network to reach teachers easily already existed through their school systems.
Some teachers may have been vaccinated earlier than expected, but the general goal was to make sure that a high-priority group gets the vaccine, and it does not go to waste.
Elliott explained that sometimes there are extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine when combined, which are prepared by local pharmacists in Kittitas County.
‘You just do not know how many extra doses are; That’s why you have to wait 10 minutes for this flexible pool of people to get the vaccine, ‘said Elliott. “We did it with teachers.”
The distribution of the vaccine doses is important for the vaccines Pfizer and Moderna, both of which are used by the country. The other part involves figuring out the logistics of traffic control and patient flow to paperwork and the administration and monitoring of vaccinated patients, Knutson said.
“We want to make sure that when we get people for the first shot, that we already have a system in place, and we can guarantee that people will come back for the second round,” Knutson said.
One of the biggest challenges facing the country and many in the country is that people want to get the vaccine as soon as possible, Knutson said. But vaccination will be a long process.
She said she was investigating volunteers and making sure they were doing everything in their power to prevent the staff from being burned out so that the vaccinations could continue. The goal is to distribute 215 vaccine doses per day at two clinics this week, she said.
“We are really aware of how eager people are to get their vaccinations, and we just want to guarantee people that we are taking out the vaccine effectively, that we are not storing it and that we are not going to waste the vaccine,” she said. said.