By Misti Crane
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Many of those who’ve spent hours shepherding crowds, answering questions and vaccinating the public in recent weeks have been doing it free.
The Franklin County and Columbus Medical Reserve Corps is a 3-year-old organization of volunteers that has helped make mass vaccinations happen.
The local corps was formed after Hurricane Katrina, during a time when many similar efforts had started or were beginning throughout the country. Since its inception, medical professionals and other volunteers have helped with various projects, including seasonal-flu-vaccine clinics.
But it wasn’t until this unprecedented flu season that the volunteers played such a prominent and critical role, said Robin Martin, the medical reserve corps coordinator for Franklin County and Columbus.
As of Tuesday, there were about 1,700 volunteers, about 700 of which signed up in the past month and a half, she said. A quarter or more of the corps are non-medical volunteers. The rest are doctors, nurses, paramedics, pharmacists and other medical professionals.
The mix of volunteers and paid employees has varied from clinic to clinic, but volunteers made up as much as half the staff at the county’s clinic Saturday, Martin said. It takes 102 people to run a clinic with 20 vaccination stations, she said.
“There’s never been anything quite like this. We’ve not had in the last 30 or 40 years anything equivalent in terms of trying within a very short period of time to vaccinate so many people,” said volunteer Dr. Nathan Yost of Bexley.
Yost, who is 61, is retired from private practice but keeps an active license.
He said he’s been happy to help answer questions at clinics and thinks the reserve corps will emerge from this pandemic stronger and well-equipped to handle other emergencies, including natural disasters.
Nicole McGarity, an emergency department nurse, said she signed up because she believes in giving back to the community.
“I always look for opportunities to help in different ways, and I think this is something where there’s definitely a need,” said McGarity, who is 30 and lives on the East Side.
Amy Irvin, a stay-at-home mom and registered nurse from Westerville, said she enrolled long before pandemic flu became an imminent threat.
“The things that were just sort of theoretical that we were all planning for a year ago, it’s actually working,” she said.
In the past week and a half, she has volunteered at three county-run clinics and will work at more in upcoming weeks, she said.
Irvin, who is 49, has vaccinated and worked as a nurse supervisor.
She’s learned a lot in the past few weeks, she said, and even helped identify an issue that hadn’t been anticipated when a Muslim woman at a recent clinic expressed concern about the pork gelatin used as a stabilizer in some forms of the vaccine.
Some religions, including Islam and Judaism, call for believers to abstain from pork.
Now, the paperwork given to people before they receive vaccine is more explicit about use of the ingredient, she said.
As she’s watched the clinics unfold, Martin has been impressed by volunteers’ versatility and their ability to put skills they already know into practice in a new setting, Irvin said.
School nurses and paramedics have been excellent with screening the children and parents before they’re vaccinated. Teachers, she said, have been especially talented at keeping kids in their seats and distracted once they reach the vaccination table.
Copyright 2009 The Columbus Dispatch
All Rights Reserved