Leader in vaccine rollout a problem-solver, connector
Ruth Leslie’s role helps get shots to nearly a third of population
In the 15 weeks since the Capital Region Vaccine Network was born, a coalition of local health departments, hospitals, community health clinics, pharmacists, doctors and volunteers have managed to get shots into the arms of over 353,000 local residents — or nearly one-third of the area’s population.
The group of dedicated professionals and volunteers has been working around the clock, standing up large-scale vaccination sites and small pop-up clinics, reallocating doses across county lines when the need arises, and communicating about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to boosting vaccine acceptance and reducing barriers to access.
The point person behind all this cross-communication and coordination? A former physical therapist by the name of Ruth Leslie, who worked for the state
Department of Health for 17 years as director of hospital services before taking on a two-year stint with MVP Health Care.
Last December, she was tapped to serve as the planning lead for the Capital Region’s vaccine hub, Albany Medical Center. The model — in which hospitals from around the state were selected by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to serve as “hubs” for their region’s vaccination efforts — came as a surprise to some, especially county health officials who had expected to oversee their own mass vaccination plans that had been in development for years.
“One of the first things I did was call up the county health departments and say, ‘Let’s get a call together because we’re gonna need to put our heads together,’” Leslie recalled. “So it hasn’t had the feel, at least in my opinion, of a ‘we say, you do’ kind of approach. It’s been, how do we — meaning everyone — get this done?”
The work that has followed since has been immense and logistically challenging.
In her new role, Leslie serves as a go-between, problem solver and connector. She passes questions and concerns from the region’s vaccine providers and community stakeholders on to the governor’s office and state Health Department, and communicates their responses and ever-changing guidance back.
This process led to the state agreeing to expand eligibility at the Washington Avenue Armory vaccination site in Albany to vulnerable ZIP codes that had been left out of the initial eligibility phase, said Dr. Dennis Mckenna, president and CEO of Albany Med. It’s also how the state knew to lower the eligibility age to people 50 and older this week, as vaccine providers informed Leslie and other regional hubs that appointment slots weren’t filling up as quickly as they once were.
“Obviously what the state wants to do is pass information and get information back,” Mckenna said. “And having one entity representing eight counties is easier than having eight local health departments and all these other providers trying to speak and get spoken to. So Ruth is the aggregator of what the needs are in the Capital Region.”
There’s a fair amount of daily troubleshooting inherent to the job, especially since providers have one week to get shots into arms whenever a new shipment arrives or else face penalties.
This past week, for example, Leslie said Hometown Health Centers in Schenectady reached out to say they had 100 vulnerable people willing to get vaccinated if she could find them 100 doses. Leslie was informed that Washington County had 100 doses to spare and began to get the paperwork ready to seek state approval for the reallocation. Then she learned that Albany County, which is much closer, also had 100 doses to spare.
“So we say, ‘Hold up, Washington County, we’ll have you redistribute to another partner who needs it up there’ and Albany County stepped in and redistributed to Schenectady,” she said.
The red tape to redistribute vaccine took a lot longer in the early stages of the rollout, Leslie said. Now it takes about half a day for the state to approve reallocations, she said, but the sheer amount of coordination that’s required across multiple stakeholders is time-consuming on its own.
“Our network partners will move heaven and Earth to get that vaccine moved… they’ll come in on their way to work, on their way home from work at 9 o’clock at night — whatever, whenever they need to make sure they can meet those time frames,” she said.
Vaccine equity is another major component of the work the regional hub has been doing. The hubs were instructed to craft vaccination plans that included “fair and equitable” strategies for getting vaccine out to different populations, with a focus on communities with lower vaccination rates and poorer health outcomes.
To do this, Leslie helped organize a Health Equity Taskforce made up of about 70 stakeholders and community organizations who talk every other week. Albany Med also consulted with the University at Albany School of Public Health to identify socially vulnerable communities in the region and target vaccination clinics in those areas.
Whether this is working remains to be seen. Leslie said she has been asking the state for Zip-code level vaccination data every week but it has yet to release it. The state has, however, released county, region and state-level data showing ongoing racial and ethnic disparities in who has been getting vaccine.
In the Capital Region, 92 percent of doses distributed to date have gone to white people (who make up 86 percent of the population aged 15 and older), 3.8 percent have gone to Black people (7.7 percent of the population), 3.2 percent have gone to Asian people (3.8 percent of the population), and 2.6 percent have gone to Hispanic and/or Latino people (4.6 percent of the population).
One strategy that has seemed to work is bringing clinics to specific populations in settings that are familiar to them, Leslie said.
“I think it’s wonderful to see with these smaller (clinics) that some groups are more comfortable getting vaccinated in locations that feel comfortable to them,” she said. “That has certainly been true of the (developmentally disabled) population and it has been true of our Black and brown communities.”
Recent successes, she said, include vaccination clinics at the Center for Disability Services in Albany for individuals with developmental disabilities, a clinic at Capital District Latinos headquarters staffed by Spanish speakers, a clinic for the LGBTQIA community on Lark Street, and a clinic at the Masjid As-salam mosque on Central Avenue for the Muslim community — just in time for some to safely gather during the holy month of Ramadan.
“A lot of great ideas and wonderful things have happened when we have people approach us and say, ‘You know, I was thinking’ or ‘You know, if we did this maybe this could happen,’ and it’s been terrific and we’ve been able to run with those ideas,” she said.
Other ongoing work of the hub includes corralling local vaccine information into one place through the development of Capitalregionvax.com, a website featuring a list of area providers who get vaccine every week, frequently asked questions, hotline numbers and volunteer signup information. The hub is also working toboost vaccine acceptance among those who are on the fence. A public service campaign is slated to roll out across multiple media platforms featuring diverse faces from across the region, Mckenna said.
“We’ve got people right now that are wanting to get in to get their vaccine and we’ve got a group of people that we probably won’t ever convince to get the vaccine,” Leslie said. “But there is a large group in the middle that can be moved.”
While the job has proved time-consuming and hectic, Leslie said it has its rewards.
“Like many families, my family has had a lot of loss due to COVID,” she said. “Not only social loss but also family members that we’ve lost… and so this helps to feel like I’m helping other people regain that normalcy and helping to bring people together in a safer way — one shot at a time, one family at a time, one vulnerable person at a time. It’s an incredibly rewarding experience.”