Retail Pharmacies For The Win On Immunizations
Introduction
Who remembers what vaccines you are due for without seeing your doctor? Well given how often people forgot about their second Covid-19 vaccine, I cannot imagine not many people do. I could not tell you the last shot a received that was not a Covid-19 or flu shot. Even then you go in for a checkup, but vaccines still can be missed. I remember I received my first HPV shot as a teen and went around 10 years before completing the series. For those of you who do not know, Gardasil 9 which protects against HPV is given at months 0, 2, and 6. Which means this was missed on numerous occasions. The point I am making is most vaccines are administered in a clinic or hospital while a significantly less are administered at pharmacies. I honestly lost count at the number of people who I gave Covid-19 shots to who never knew we were capable of administering vaccines. I always jokingly said I would see them in the fall for their flu shot.
Pre Covid-19 Vaccines
According to many studies before Covid-19 vaccines became available about 2/3rd of flu shots were administered at a hospital or clinic while only 1/3rd of flu shots were administered in a pharmacy. I always thought this was wrong. I remember as an intern and pharmacist I have always administered what I would consider a large amount of flu shots. In reality it only ended up to be about ~400 a season, but some days when you do 20 plus, it can feel like a lot more. Looking at the data more in-depth, the pharmacy only administered about 1,200 flu shots total. This number seemed like a lot but at the same time when this number is put into perspective we were only hitting about a 1/4th of the population in the area. We also had to work hard to even touch these numbers by completing offsite clinics with local businesses and the elderly homes nearby. When we were signing up to be a provider to administer Covid-19 vaccines the owner and I agreed if we could double our flu shots we would be ecstatic. We did not stop there however. We had to provide an estimate on the number of vaccines we would be administering. In doing so, we went big and set a goal I did not think we would hit of 5,000 vaccines total.
Post Covid-19 Vaccines
Covid-19 Vaccines provided a whole new class of difficulties. First of all, we had to fight an arm and a leg just to get vaccines at our pharmacy. We partnered with both our state and a Federal Pharmacy Partner (FPP) and had to receive vaccines from the state at the very start of this. For some reasons my state was allocating vaccines based on geographic area and favoring hospitals and clinic. This did not include the federal government also favoring CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate all Long Term Care (LTC) facilities which makes my blood boil. In a work place were CVS and Walgreens already abuse their pharmacist, I do not know why they were allowed to do it. Especially, since the closet CVS/Walgreens pharmacy happens to be almost 50 minutes away and in the first few months they wasted well over 100,000 doses due to poor planning.
The Start of Something Big
When we were receiving vaccines from the state, it was a slow start. We were only able to receive 100 dose a week if we were lucky. This all changed once our pharmacy was able to order vaccine from our Federal Pharmacy Partner. Starting in March of 2020 we were able to administer 100 vaccines per day 5 days a week! It was a lot of work setting this up, but the pay off was rewarding. We also receive tons of compliments from our community stating how easy and organized we were. Although I managed our vaccine process, I am not an organized person. I have to give thanks to my staff for that. We were able to keep administering around 100 doses per day well into summer before things slowly tapered off. I was not keeping track at the number of doses at this time but I would estimate we did well over 5,000 shots during that time frame. Lets put this in perspective, we went from doing around 1,200 flu shots a season to doing over 5,000 Covid-19 shots in about the same time! That is an insane increase in vaccines administered at our pharmacy. It was a start of a shift from hospitals and clinics to pharmacies administering a majority of vaccines.
Time For Boosters
As we slowed down on the number of shots we were giving, we had to adapt. We found what worked for our pharmacy and made it as easy as we could for our community. But we were not prepared for what would happened when the CDC and FDA approved the 1st booster dose in October 2020. There were a lot of elderly patients who were ready to get the booster and they came to us. Why? Well this is because the local hospitals and clinics had a waiting list 3 weeks to a month out. Our pharmacy was the place most people came to as our wait time was less than a week. Once again we were able to administer around 3,000 booster shots before the end of the year.
A Time For A Change
By the end of 2020 we were able to administer just over 10,000 Covid-19 vaccines! This is twice the amount of our insane goal of 5,000 and almost 10x our total number of flu shots. Covid-19 vaccines saw a shift were 2/3rds of all shots were given at a pharmacy compared to 1/3rd from hospital and clinics. You could say this is due to the differences between both business models. To be fair, hospitals were more focused on treating Covid-19 patients compared to pharmacies. This shift is a win for independent retail pharmacies and our time to take advantage and look at other vaccine opportunities. The Covid-19 pandemic has many children miss important vaccines which could have easily been avoided. Now it is our turn to focus on other ways we can vaccinate our communities.