YRMC gets 206k calls for 1,000 vaccines
Hospital says it is working to improve appointment process and seeking more doses
After announcing Tuesday afternoon that it had 1,000 COVID-19 vaccinations, Yuma Regional Medical Center was inundated with calls – to the tune of over 200,000 calls in a matter of hours.
Appointments for the vaccinations were filled in less than five hours, the hospital announced via social media Tuesday night, noting that the local demand for the vaccine outweighs what the hospital has been supplied with.
In an update on Wednesday, Machele Headington, vice president of marketing and communications at YRMC, said the hospital’s call center received approximately 206,259 calls in that fivehour window Tuesday, which either made their way into the queue, to a live operator or to a recorded message providing an update of the situation.
Headington said several callers indicated they had used three or four different phones to autodial the call center until they were able to successfully get through, which posed some complications to the call system. She said the hospital is actively working to secure and implement additional measures to “create a situation that doesn’t require people to get on the phone like that.”
“Over the next 24 to 48 hours, our team is looking very closely at that to find out if there is a way we can position this to narrow the groups down and make sure that we get through them all, just in smaller groupings,” Headington said.
According to Headington, the earliest YRMC expects to receive additional vaccines is next week. In the meantime, staff is working “really hard to make sure, whether we get 1,000 or 10,000, that we have a way to minimize the frustration for folks.”
Nearly half of the 1,000 appointments secured for the vaccination clinic this Thursday and Friday were made via YRMC’s MyCare app. According to Headington, those who utilized the app
indicated that they had an easier scheduling experience in comparison to dialing the call center.
This week’s clinic will take place Thursday and Friday at the Yuma Civic Center. Individuals must have an appointment to receive a vaccine, Headington said, noting that 129 individuals whose calls were queued but not yet answered by a live operator prior to the appointments filling on Tuesday were placed on a waitlist. If an individual who secured an appointment does not show up to receive their vaccine, waitlisted individuals will be contacted. Due to the scarce supply, walkins will not be accepted.
“We don’t want to waste a single dose,” Headington said. “We want to make sure every single dose gets used. Each day as we have extra doses, we will call those waitlisted people in to get them. We’ve had a lot of people say, ‘My wife got an appointment but I didn’t, can I go with her and try to get in?’ The answer is no, we won’t be able to squeeze in extra people with every person who comes. But we will make sure that every dose is used by having that waitlist.”
While the hospital has the space and manpower to administer 1,000 vaccines a day at the Civic Center “for as long as we need to in order to get the community vaccinated,” Headington said the issue is the availability of supplies.
“Our real reality is this: we need more vaccines,” Headington said. “And we have to continue to advocate for that, because little patches at a time just create frustration for everybody.”
In the meantime, Headington said the hospital’s communications team will provide regular updates via YRMC’s social media platforms and www.yumaregional.org.
As this week’s clinic is “the first of many,” individuals are encouraged to keep the call center’s toll free number, 855-3725640, nearby so that when more vaccination appointments are available, they’ll be ready to make the call.
Individuals 65 and older who have not yet activated a YRMC MyCare patient portal account are encouraged to set one up at https://mycare.yumaregional.org in order to schedule an appointment online when more become available. The hospital noted that this must be done on a desktop computer, not via the mobile app.
“Once we have the confirmation that we’ll get a larger shipment of vaccines, I think we’ll be in a much better position to be able to offer several alternatives for people to sign up, which would then leave the phone lines for those people who don’t have access to a computer or who aren’t comfortable using a computer,” Headington said.
She added: “We sympathize with all those who are trying to get in. We want people to be able to get the vaccine, and we’re grateful that we have so many in our community stepping up to get vaccinated; that’s really what’s going to help us get to a better, healthier place. Please don’t give up. We will continue to do this and continue to be there at the civic center for however long we need to be to ensure that those who need a vaccine get what they need.”