REGIONAL- From the moment COVID-19 vaccines were made available to community health centers, the five Scenic Rivers Health Services locations, including those in Cook and Tower, have been getting shots in arms.
First came vaccinations for their existing patients 65 and over, soon followed by an expansion to that age group in the broader community. When Minnesota recently increased the pool of those eligible for the vaccine by well over one million people, Scenic Rivers staff adapted and kept moving forward.
The results, said Chief Executive Officer Mike Holmes, have placed Scenic Rivers in the top five in the region in the number of shots delivered.
“As of end of Friday, we had done 4,528 first doses and 3,176 second doses of the Moderna vaccine, which is actually a pretty high total for any of the systems in northeast Minnesota,” Holmes said on Tuesday. “We should be at 8,000 total doses today.”
Holmes said that Cook and Bigfork account for the largest share of the total as they have been offering vaccinations five days a week, while the other locations have more limited schedules.
The system is about ready to pick up the pace even more with the addition of a new COVID vaccination clinic in Eveleth that will be located in a former doctor’s office near the old hospital. New staff have been hired and are being trained, and if all goes well with outfitting the physical needs for things like chairs and office equipment, the clinic should open for patients next Monday, Holmes said.
“A number of our patients are from across the Iron Range, but it’s also an underserved population,” Holmes said. “There is a lower income population in that community and in some of the Iron Range communities, and we were looking to try and create a little better access for some of those populations. Certainly not everyone has reliable transportation to get to Cook or to Tower.”
A second rationale for the expansion is the anticipated increase in demand as more and more people become eligible for the vaccine, Holmes said.
Tower Medical Clinic Manager Valerie Turnbull talked about how the vaccination effort is going at her site.
“We’ve been running (vaccinations) on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” she said. “Once there’s a first-dose day, four weeks later you have to schedule a second-dose day. Sometimes you run into a month of giving first doses, then the next month you’re going to be giving second doses, unless you can fit first doses somewhere else in the schedule.”
As with other sites, ongoing testing is available at the Tower location, with rapid tests and send-out tests available for those with COVID symptoms and send-out tests for those who have reason to believe they have been exposed or may be asymptomatic. Send-out test results are returned in two to three days, while rapid test results are available the same day.
All the vaccinations and testing have created extra workload and additional stress for staff, but everything and everyone is holding up well, Turnbull said.
“Nobody prepared to do this when they signed on to health care,” Turnbull said. “It’s been a big, big job, and they’ve stepped up and they’ve been amazing. We have had a few of our staff members who are casual (part-time) staff who have really stepped up and helped out during these times, because we’ve needed the additional help. I’m extremely thankful to everyone for all their hard work.”
Also helping to mitigate the stress is seeing what getting vaccinated means to some of their patients, Turnbull said.
“They’re so very thankful and relieved,” Turnbull said. “A lot of people have stayed home for this entire time, and it allows them to feel a little more confident to go out to pick up their groceries or do their daily routines like picking up their mail from the post office, just simple things that we take for granted.”
It’s been challenging throughout the Scenic Rives system, Holmes said.
“Just dealing with all of the quarantines and isolation and testing and people with COVID, some people ending up quite ill with COVID. It’s been a high stress situation for everyone,” Holmes said. “And then everyone was just spending all of 2020 waiting until there was a vaccine developed. The availability of the vaccine has made a difference. Especially for the senior population, for some of them, they’ve been isolated from their family. Being able to see family members again, the ability to see grandchildren, it’s a wonderful thing.”
Now that Scenic Rivers has in large part taken care of its existing eligible patient load, its sites have been added to the state’s vaccine locator map for any eligible people in the region to access their services. The Eveleth site will be added once it’s operational, Holmes said.
“I think every system, every health organization, has done really well,” he said. “They’re trying to get patient populations vaccinated. COVID is not an illness that people I would want to get, it’s just a serious disease. I’ve had some friends come down with COVID that were hospitalized and they tell me that it is something that no one would ever want.”