The role of infection prevention (IP) in vaccine compliance has traditionally been focused on influenza vaccinations, but all that changed with SARS-CoV-2. Encouraging vaccination and helping with vaccine acceptance was a role that fell in part on the shoulders of IP in many health systems, including Emory University Hospital.
In a poster presented at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC), held June 13-15, 2022 in Indianapolis, Indiana, Jessica Tarabay, MPH, MHR, CIC, infection prevention manager at Emory University Hospital, shared how Emory’s team built trust to implement interventions that increased compliance with the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine and resulted in more of 1,000 employees successfully completed the vaccine series. He detailed the process in a video interview with Infection Control Today®.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
ICT®: Can you discuss the role of trust and how it influences vaccination decisions in general?
Tarabay: I feel like with confidence, you are really building these relationships with your top teams, all departments and people. [who] they have a big influence within your organization. Building this partnership … goes along the same lines as building that trust. Ultimately, I look at our department and infection prevention as a relationship department. We are a support department and therefore having the confidence of our teams really helps us get the job done. We cannot do this without these relationships.
ICT®: Can the role of IP in vaccination compliance before SARS-CoV-2 be discussed?
Tarabay: Especially when it comes to the flu, we do a presentation during the new employee orientation on why it’s so important, but we really understand why compliance with the vaccine is so important. And I think with SARS-CoV-2, really just understanding the hesitation between certain groups within health care and communities as a whole, and really just learning to listen, was one of the most important components to creating this. confidence.
What we did is we went to departments, specifically those with very low compliance, and we just learned. We wanted to see what was really going on, we learned that part of it was that transportation was a barrier. We also learned that some people didn’t really have the resources to pay for the copayment if they had to go to the emergency room for some reason. There are a lot of questions that, as an organization, we weren’t able to answer right away, and just building those relationships, sitting and listening, is where we were really able to answer some of the most frequently asked questions that really helped increase compliance.
ICT®: What were some of the barriers to vaccine compliance that were found once SARS-CoV-2 vaccination became mandatory?
Tarabay: I think the barriers to how, when something is forced, and once it became that mandate, to really understand who the key influential team members are in a department and if it’s a leader who completely doubts, it will be our first source, right? Therefore, if a leader of an entire department does not comply with the vaccine, he prepares the stage and arrives at his team. And so I think you just start by listening to them and being really observant of what’s going on in your organization. City councils don’t do anything because we weren’t really reaching out to the people who needed it most.
ICT®: Your poster details different methods that were tested to increase compliance. Can you tell us some of these?
Tarabay: So you go into groups of departments and just listen. They were literally individual conversations with staff members, even [environmental services] at the director level and really understanding. We even had team members coming down whenever we offered on-site vaccination. We went down, each of us, and we held hands with certain members of the team and waited … the waiting time of 15 or 30 minutes. [post-vaccine] only depending on certain levels of risk. And that, frankly, fell apart. We did it with one person and they went to tell another team member and they told another team member and then he became that camaraderie and that’s how we saw the increase in vaccine compliance.
Also just collaborate with our management engineers and nursing colleagues, highly respected people in the organization who were able to deliver wagons around the hospital to each department, and really just trying to get a group there as well. that we will come to you, you. they will not have to come to us. It took a while, I will say it took many months to get there. But I will say that ultimately it is no longer the whole topic of conversation. It was because we did what we had to do.
ICT®: What were the overall results?
Tarabay: The departments with the lowest compliance, even reaching 80% of the compliance rate or 70% when they come from 40%, are huge, huge results. Ultimately, we had a mandatory vaccination that we had to have the results achieved on October 1, and therefore we saw an instrumental impact with each of these methods.