often are uninsured tend to end up. White Memorial Medical Center in East Los Angeles where I work has been very active in partnership with the consulate.
They’ ve learned many years ago to diversify. I saw real strong active response back in 1994, when Proposition 187 would have denied obstetrical services to undocumented pregnant women who are low income. I saw them become very, very active and getting information out to the constituents who are very worried, of course, that doctors and emergency rooms were going to play the role of immigration agents, which never happened.
If we can reach the essential worker and their employer, we’ re also going to reach their family, who also may be isolated. They’ re worried about losing productivity and the ability to work for two or three days and these are generally folks who are living day to day or paycheck to paycheck, so two or three days is a major hit for them financially.
There was a tremendous amount of confusion around that even among the medical community. When somebody has been infected, how long do you need to wait to treat them?
We’ re seeing a lot of confusion about the time between the initial shot and the boosters. Is it six months? Is it eight months? Can we mix and match vaccines, right? We need to constantly be cognizant of the fact that we need accurate information, especially when we know that social media is rife with a lot of myths and misinformation.
and stereotypes about it.
Something we’ re working on in the early stages, is to see if we can get a pilot project where properly trained community health workers properly supervise, that could actually give the shot at the time that they’ re providing the education, because what often happens is they’ re able to engage the patient and their family and motivate them to get vaccinated. And then they’ ve got to say,“ Okay, now let’ s stop and make an appointment,” and then it just breaks down. Our goal is to see if we can get pilot status locally or even statewide.
Then, there’ s geomapping. Working directly with health plans, they’ re able to map out where our patients are assigned to us; where they are, where they live, people that have not been immunized, so that we can actually now start doing home visits or going to public housing units where they may not trust outsiders, to be able to identify that there’ s a locus of folks that we can immunize.
And by being a hub, we can take a mobile unit that will immunize everybody whether or not there are patients, but our patient becomes the portal to identifying people that are still isolated and not getting vaccinated. So that’ s something we’ re going to be deploying along with the promotoras.
Education of the community, particularly those that have experienced disparities in access to the vaccine, is not a single source of truth, but various sources of truth that the community trusts. That way we can get accurate information about things like what are the current guidelines for vaccination? What are the nuances of when can you give a certain vaccine compared to other vaccines?
One of the things that we’ ve done, we’ re about to deploy a community health worker project through a HRSA grant that we got with 10 promoters assembled, which is the Spanish version of community health worker, who are trusted sources, because they’ ve already been doing important education on chronic disease, mental health, now we’ re just going to add this element of the COVID vaccine, and to be able to educate the patients and inform them with the truth about the vaccines, but also dispel the negative myths
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 28