Kedren Health Becomes a Major Staging Ground for COVID-19 Vaccine Inoculation
Community members in line to receive vaccination.
Kedren Health Becomes a Major Staging Ground for COVID-19 Vaccine Inoculation
Dr. Jerry Abraham, the epidemiologist who leads Kedren Health’ s COVID-19 vaccination task force, is perpetually busy. He’ s a roving, peripatetic man in motion. He makes sure that vaccination dosages are administered steadily throughout the various oncampus sites. He gives daily progress updates to staff and administrators. Intermittently, he reviews the daily count of available dosages of the Moderna vaccine. He periodically texts news media contacts. He constantly confers with his staff, inoculates patients himself, and strategizes with Kedren’ s senior medical team.
Sites such as Dodger Stadium and the Inglewood Forum, with many acres of real estate that serve as staging areas for vaccinations, dwarf the number of people that Kedren can daily serve. As the Kedren site has taken shape, by now having inoculated over 12,000 people since the facility was enrolled as a provider last December 24th, Kedren Health’ s primary mission of ministering to the local community’ s most vulnerable residents and workers has had an unquestionably vital community impact. On this day, the site began shutting down late afternoon with over 1,000 people having been vaccinated that day.
Dr. Abraham bristled at the news media accounts that painted the group of“ vaccine chasers” as a primary audience that the facility seeks to serve.“ The story is not about rich white people. We vaccinate elderly African Americans and Latinos who live in our community. We vaccinate Koreans and Vietnamese. We want to get as much vaccine into as many arms as possible,” he noted.
As he was speaking, a group of elderly Korean Americans lined up to receive their vaccine shot was a highly visible presence. Most had heard about the site from their church pastors who had arranged transportation to the site.
Kedren’ s clinical operations lead Sonny Tran described the infrastructure of the Kedren-built vaccination site.“ We erected full-on critical care tents to protect our staff and clients. Our priority is serving seniors, particularly those with barriers to effective healthcare. We are also inoculating all tiers of medical workers and frontline people who serve our community.”
All of the COVID-19 response leadership interviewed point to how effectively the institution pivoted to improving patient care in the face of the pandemic. The facility continues to test 400 people daily.
The strategy is based on flexibility. Dr. Kelly Jones, chief medical officer for primary care noted,“ Our team’ s primary goals are to take all of our extra doses and put them in seniors’ arms,” notes Tran.“ Kedren has the resources to work with this population.” As Tran spoke, Dr. Abraham was on the phone with an AmeriCorps program representative seeking to send volunteers to Kedren for several months as additional program support.
“ When the pandemic became a major threat last March, Kedren responded aggressively with a telehealth program as a way of remotely communicating with patients and colleagues. We had to change our service delivery logistics. Everything was taken outside and placed in tents. We’ ve been flexible in ways that are safe, such as using the whole campus for testing and vaccination.”
The evolution of Kedren’ s participation as a frontline participant in the anti-COVID-19 fight was quite circuitous. As Dr. Abraham noted,“ Like CDU, Kedren is an LA County and City health partner. By the week before Christmas, we were worried that the small psychiatric hospitals had been overlooked. Meanwhile, you had patients and frontline workers who were coming down with COVID. We had to stop patient admissions.”
Dr. Abraham noted that the team became very persistent as they asked around how to participate in the relief effort.“ Suddenly we were on the vaccine supply lists. Our first inoculations occurred on December 30th.” In the first days, his team vaccinated 300 people including the entire facility staff.
Emboldened and energized, Dr. Abraham and his staff started driving to County warehouses for vaccine supplies. The first delivery had 100 doses. With continued contact
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 3