A recipe for success

A location reimagined

“A few years back, a mumps outbreak on campus gave us the experience we needed and the confidence to know we could handle distributing this vaccine,” explained Virginia McNally, a registered nurse with Student and Employee Health Services who also volunteered at the Liacouras Center Surge Facility during the first months of the pandemic.

At each clinic, the team followed a strict workflow, with nurses reconstituting the vaccine and noting the expiration times. An area was designated for administering the vaccines and a space was set aside to observe the patients following the injection. Staff from Temple’s Office of Environmental Health and Radiation Safety took responsibility for managing storage, temperature control and expiration times of the vaccine. 

Wearing color coded vests to indicate each one’s role, employees and volunteers—many of whom were students—from across the university, including School of Pharmacy faculty, all came together with one goal in mind. 

It was all very precise and efficient. And it went like clockwork, because it had to.

“The comradery of the team and the way we all came together from different departments was amazing,” McNally noted.

“But when I looked around in White Hall at the line of chairs filled with people getting injections, it was not lost on me that this was not the intended purpose for the building,” she added. “And that’s when the historic importance of what we were experiencing would sink in.” 

Ben Mobo, a physician and director of employee health services at Temple, also sings the praises of the volunteer crew and staff who manned the vaccine clinic, where he served as the lead medical officer on duty. 

Mobo remained working in person on campus, starting with the earliest days of the pandemic, ensuring employee health workers were fit-tested—or properly fitted—with N95 masks and serving the facilities, maintenance and campus safety services staff members as they carried out their essential duties, also in person. Mobo made sure that health and safety protocols were being maintained and stayed up to date on how to keep workers safe and prevent workplace transmissions of the virus.

And, when an employee cut himself on campus during the process of 3D-printing face guards, it was Mobo who treated him.

“When he explained to me how he got his injury, I welled up with pride knowing Temple faculty and staff had undertaken that effort, literally making masks from scratch to protect our healthcare workers at Temple Hospital—it was amazing,” said Mobo. 

A precious ingredient

Looking at how smoothly Temple’s vaccine clinics ran belies the logistics that went into pulling them together behind the scenes.

“In the beginning, if you recall, the vaccine was like gold,” said Mark Denys, senior director of health services at Temple. 

The first hurdle for Temple was getting approved as a vaccination site by the city, Denys explained. Temple was the only university in the city that had its own vaccination site. Other universities had to partner with outside pharmacies or agencies to give their vaccines.

But what came with that approval was a host of requirements. As an approved site, the university had to ensure that only those meeting the criteria set by the city were, in fact, getting the doses. Those receiving the vaccines had to be Philadelphia residents, and they had to meet certain criteria, whether it was working in a high-risk setting or having specific medical conditions. And all of that had to be documented so that the people who needed the vaccine the most could be prioritized. As a result, the Temple team did a lot of vetting of lists, so that they could be sure not to violate any agreement the university had with the city.

“And then, of course, we used the Pfizer vaccine,” explained Denys. “So, in addition to requiring proper refrigeration, it also was complicated by being packaged in vials of six. We didn’t want to waste anything, so it was kind of a crazy time trying to make sure that we scheduled the appointments in exact multiples of six.”

During the peak weeks of distribution, the team was able to administer approximately 600 doses per day on average—with the count on a few of the days reaching a full 800.

But to really put Temple’s vaccine efforts into perspective, you need to understand that it was all happening simultaneously to an intensive and robust, in-house COVID-19 testing program.

A spoonful of collaboration

While Gerhard and his team created the testing kits and lab process, Denys and Meghan Duffy, associate director in the office of the provost, worked on the testing sites. “We really looked to see where we needed the tests and what sites and locations would fit our needs, which was basically a large open space that could get people in and out very quickly and easily,” Denys said.

He and Duffy considered 20 different sites at the Health Sciences Center and on Main Campus, discussing possible staffing and capacity, looking at the number of people who would be on campus, and trying to predict the demand various locations would have to meet. Mitten Hall and the Howard Gittis Student Center were chosen because the former is often used for vaccinations and the latter is a familiar location for students. Also, both were easily accessible.

“It was a huge partnership with the ITS department, with facilities, with HR to get staff up and running, to get the spaces set up with power and data and equipment,” Duffy said. “It really was a universitywide initiative.”

The biggest challenge they faced was the lack of time. Temple’s testing lab didn’t exist at Thanksgiving of 2020 and had to be outfitted and staffed quickly, with Gerhard’s team expanding from three or four scientists and technicians to around a dozen. The testing sites also needed access to hard data because information covered by HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) can’t be transmitted using Wi-Fi. 

Denys and Duffy worked through winter break, as did many of their colleagues, and hired 35 people in two weeks, some of whom were temporary employees that had to be replaced as they took up positions elsewhere.

“We had to train everybody in a very short period of time,” Denys said. 

Another challenge was establishing the data flow between the testing sites, the lab and Student Health Services. “We already had an electronic medical record system,” Denys said. “But we had to get a person’s unique identification to the lab along with a lab order. Then, they had to be able to link the test vial up to the individual, get the result and make sure that it was assigned to that individual. It all has to be ironclad.” Student Health received a copy of the results, which they then shared with students.

The program was a monumental effort. “We have set up mass vaccination clinics and flu shot clinics and we did several mass testing days in the fall, but nothing to the scale of what we did in the spring,” Denys said.