Now, the multifunctional team of essential workers and volunteers is working to distribute the vaccine and is working, says Elliott, who is in charge of distributing vaccines for the county. In fact, he says no single dose has been missed.
Although Kittitas County has administered 53% of current vaccines, the county has vaccination clinics this week to deliver a new batch of more than 2,000 vaccines, according to Kittitas Valley Healthcare. With all appointments taken, the county estimates that 97% of its doses will be administered by the end of this week.
“The infrastructure we have with everyone who communicates, everyone who is willing to be flexible and play any role that is necessary and understood (incident control system) and emergency operations centers gives us the framework to do “I did,” Elliott told CNN.
Firefighting brought lessons for the launch of vaccines
When you’re fighting big fires, you have to act fast and resources can change all of a sudden, so learning to change your plan and stay flexible is part of the job, Elliott said.
“In the case of fires, we conform and make plans around what you have available and what your priorities are,” Elliott said. “These change almost daily in the event of a forest fire because the risks change, the weather changes, all of these things change and you get more resources or you take resources away.”
Changing resources and changing priorities are similar issues when it comes to fighting the pandemic.
“The same goes for this Covid,” Elliott said. “We need the vaccine in people’s arms, preferably as close to the order of priority as we can get, but that will only go with vaccination and people will be respectful of public health guidelines. And until we get there. , the economy will continue to be wrecked and people will die. “
In command of the incidents, Elliott explained how he and others give enough guidance and flexibility for teams to make their own decisions. Give them guidelines and let them “operate inside the fences,” he said.
“We emphasize that people are not supposed to be told repeatedly how to do their job,” Elliott said. “You’re supposed to tell them what your goals are, give them the resources, give them the deadline, and then stay out of their business.”
In firefighting and Covid-19, Elliott says it’s important for local leaders to do what they believe is right for their community. If something goes wrong, you have to be willing to accept the consequences, he said.
“Don’t expect it to be perfect,” Elliott said. “You won’t get all your answers, you won’t get all the answers to all the questions. It’s up to the local leadership to take reasonable risks.”
And when possible, make decisions locally, he said. Large jurisdictions are just a “series of smaller units,” like the hospital districts of a large county, he said.
“I think we need to trust each other a little bit, give ourselves a little bit of grace, and recognize that we all try to work to achieve the same,” Elliott said. “The more local you can let decisions be made in this distribution process, the more successful you will be.”
While Elliott has been successful in his county, he doesn’t want people to think he has all the answers.
“I don’t want it to seem like we have it all figured out because no,” he said. “There are nights I don’t sleep very well.”
How “zero doses have been missed”
The county received more than 2,100 doses of the vaccine last week and has already assigned a person’s name to each of those valuable roads, Elliott said.
This may not sound like much to someone from a big city, but it does to this county. Located in downtown Washington, Kittitas County has 48,140 residents, according to the state’s Office of Financial Management.
“We’re spread over 95% by the vaccine we’ve received so far this week,” Elliott said last week. “Since we just got a big shipment of the vaccine, after Friday of next week, we’ll get back to over 95%. When I say 95%, the vaccine is already in people’s arms or people have a difficult appointment when your appointment is because you have to separate the first and second dose “.
Kasey Knutson, a spokeswoman for the Kittitas County Department of Public Health, has been informing the public when the vaccine arrives, who is eligible based on the current vaccine phase and how to get appointments. He is also in charge of getting volunteers to help with the distribution.
In the short term, the emergency management center lined up 102 teachers to come in and get vaccinated, Elliott said.
The multifunctional team identified teachers, who are in vaccine phase 1B, as a group that would be able to respond quickly, Knutson said. The network to easily reach teachers already existed through their school systems.
Some teachers may have been vaccinated earlier than expected, but the overall goal was to make sure some high-priority group got the vaccine and didn’t miss it.
Elliott explained that sometimes there are additional doses with the Pfizer vaccine when mixed, which local pharmacists prepare in Kittitas County.
“You just don’t know how many extra doses, so you have to have this flexible group of people waiting on the wings with ten minutes’ notice to get the vaccine, ”Elliott said. “We did it with teachers.”
It is important to separate vaccine doses for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, both used by the county. The other part is figuring out the logistics from controlling patient traffic and flow to documentation and managing and controlling 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 those people will come back in the second round,” Knutson said.
One of the biggest challenges facing the county and many countries across the country is that people want to get the vaccine as soon as possible, Knutson said. But vaccination will be a long process.
He said he has taken care to examine the volunteers and make sure they do their best to prevent the staff from being burned so that the vaccines can continue. This week, the goal is to distribute 215 doses of vaccine a day in two clinics, he said.
“We are really aware of the desire that people have to get vaccinated and we just want to guarantee people that we will actually get the vaccine, that we will not do it and we will not waste it,” he said. dit.