How seniors got help setting up vaccine appointments
A collaboration between state Sen. Lisa Boscola and St. Luke’s University Health Network is an example of how the public and private sectors should coordinate to battle the coronavirus.
Boscola’s office and St. Luke’s teamed up to help senior citizens who had been struggling to get appointments for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Boscola, a Democrat from Bethlehem Township, told me she got the idea after seeing her mother and aunt become frustrated as they struggled to get an appointment.
“If it’s happening in my immediate family with my mother and my aunt, it has to be happening with a lot of seniors,” she said.
She approached her staff about calling seniors in her district to see if they needed help scheduling an appointment. The names were pulled from voter registration data, and the phone numbers were looked up.
More than 3,000 calls have been made in the last month by staff members Enid Vazquez, Kurt Derr, Jim Schantz, Megan Lago, Jake Glessner, Natalie Perdue, Sierra Serfass and Jenn Keim.
The initial plan was for staff to schedule appointments online for the seniors while they had them on the phone, using the various public portals available. That changed after Boscola told Melissa Shafer, an associate vice president at St. Luke’s, what her team was doing.
“If somebody wants a vaccination, get that to us and we’ll take over from there,” Shafer told her.
Boscola said it’s working. “People were getting appointments within 10, 15 minutes, some of them.”
About 70 to 80 appointments have been scheduled so far.
One of them was for JoAnn Valletta, 84, of Easton.
“It was like my prayers were answered,” Valletta said in a news release from St. Luke’s. “They made it so easy, and I am so grateful to have received my first shot. It was very organized.”
Boscola’s staff started with people 75 and older, then moved to 70-year-olds and 65-year-olds.
“We essentially created a pathway for Sen. Boscola’s team to share these names with us, and we are prioritizing them at our 10 vaccine clinic locations,” Shafer said in the release.
Some of the seniors vented about how difficult it had been for them to try to line up a vaccination appointment, Boscola said. She shared that feedback with Lehigh Valley health officials.
She knew some older people would struggle because they aren’t online or tech savvy. But she did not think the state should have created a central registration system, something I had called for.
The Lehigh Valley was faring well without a central system, Boscola said, because of the work of St. Luke’s, Lehigh Valley Health Network and the Allentown and Bethlehem health bureaus.
That work was reflected through her team’s calling, as many seniors said they had gotten at least one shot.
“It was surprising how many people were already vaccinated, or they had their first shot and they were scheduled for their second,” Boscola said. “So that was really good news for us.
“I was worried that a lot of people were falling through the cracks and they weren’t being helped. I was glad to hear that what was happening in the Lehigh Valley seemed to be working with the most vulnerable.”
Some seniors told Boscola’s staff they were not interested in getting vaccinated, or that they wanted to wait a little while “until they see how things turned out.”
Those people were “very much the minority,” she said.
You shouldn’t need another rationale to register to vote, but if you do, consider this: Only the seniors who were registered in Boscola’s district got calls asking if they needed help getting a vaccination appointment.
That’s another good reason to be on that list.