MEDICAL EDUCATION
Students from across the OU Health Sciences Center played an integral role in organizing and staffing COVID-19 vaccine clinics.
Students Play Critical Role in Vaccinating Oklahomans When COVID-19 vaccinations arrived, the logistics of making them available to faculty, staff and the public were considerable. Locations and supplies needed to be secured, a workflow had to be developed and, importantly, hundreds of volunteers were necessary for the process to run smoothly. Into those roles stepped OU Health Sciences Center students, whose time and skills led to the vaccination of more than 50,000 Oklahomans in 2021. OU College of Medicine students have been key in the effort, providing 60% of the volunteer hours among trainees and working alongside their fellow students in the Colleges of Pharmacy, Nursing, Dentistry, Allied Health, Public Health and the Graduate College. Not only have they learned about a global virus in real time, but they allowed the enterprise to vaccinate many more people than otherwise would have been possible. “Even though we are still in the developmental phase of our careers, this entire experience with vaccine clinics has allowed me to realize my potential as a student — even though I’m not yet licensed, I can still have a pretty sizable impact on the patient population. One of our biggest goals has been to empower all students to realize the same potential in themselves,” said Tram Le, a member of the College of Medicine Class of 2023 and chair of the student-led Unity Clinic. In January 2021, as vaccination efforts were expanding, the students of Unity Clinic were brought on board to help vaccinate the mass influx of people seeking their shots on campus. Unity Clinic is not a physical building but a mobile, student-led effort that is housed in the Office of
Dale Bratzler, D.O., MPH, background, OU’s Chief COVID Officer, works with students as they train to give vaccinations.
Interdisciplinary Programs at the OU Health Sciences Center. Typically, students volunteer hundreds of hours each year caring for patients at Oklahoma City’s charitable clinics and working at health fairs and educational events. Because many of those activities had been halted due to the pandemic, students were eager to help with vaccinations. The students quickly mobilized to recruit and schedule additional volunteers; help create a workflow for each step of the process, from registration to monitoring patients after their shots; train students to give injections if they had not already
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