Influenza vaccine community outreach: Leveraging an interprofessional healthcare student workforce to immunize marginalized populations.

ABSTRACT: Vulnerable populations such as the uninsured, unemployed, and unhoused face significant morbidity and mortality from influenza but are less likely to receive the annual vaccine and have limited access to medical care. We describe an interprofessional, student-run vaccine outreach program (VOP) in Davidson County, Tennessee that lowers barriers to vaccination through free vaccination events in nontraditional community locations. We provide this framework as a model to expand novel, seasonal, or outbreak-oriented vaccine outreach to resource-poor populations. Demographic data were collected from the patients who received an influenza vaccine between 2015 and 2019 through an optional survey to determine whether these events were reaching unhoused, uninsured, and/or unemployed individuals. Of

SUBMITTER: Brown SH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8096696 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature