Latest / The SHEA Podcast / COVID-19 Vaccines: Preparing for Implementation, 12/11

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COVID-19 Vaccines: Preparing for Implementation, 12/11 · The SHEA Podcast

• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Rapid Response Podcast brought to you by the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, SHA, promoting the prevention of healthcare associated infections and antibiotic resistance and seeking to advance the field of healthcare epidemiology and antibiotic surgery.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Shay is excited to launch this critical episode of the series The COVID-19 updates what we know now.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Today's recording has been repurposed from the SHA COVID-19 town hall on Sunday, December 2nd, with Dr.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Grace Lee, Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Chief Medical Officer for Practice Innovation at Sanford Children's Health.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: In her current role, Dr.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Lee primarily serves as a clinical and administrative leader in her health system and is focused on bridging quality research and implementation strategies.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Lee is currently a member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, specifically as a member of the COVID-19 vaccines work group and the chair of the COVID-19 vaccine safety technical subgroup.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Her presentation was provided with a PowerPoint, which can be accessed within the podcast summary below.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And within Shay's online education center, Learning CE.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's now dive into the presentation.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to thank Shay as an organization for being such an important and impactful leader during this COVID-19 pandemic.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been clear to me how important Shea is, but never as important as it is today.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: So again, thank you for all your time and all of the efforts that you've made to make sure that our members are able to respond as quickly as possible given how dynamic that everything is.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: As you can tell, we are all being asked to build the plane as we fly it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And even though I know the direction of the plane is flying in from the ACIP perspective, I'm also in the Jeep trying to make sure that our hospital system is able to ensure the delivery of vaccines in a fair and equitable fashion.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Based on our deliberations at ACIP, we've been able to share our ethical principles for ACIP decision making regarding the early allocation of COVID-19 vaccines.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And this was published on November 23rd in the MMWR.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: The four key principles here are to maximize benefits and minimize harms, to promote justice, to mitigate health inequities, and to promote transparency.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to go through each of these domains from the perspective of supporting our healthcare delivery system in getting vaccines to our workforce in phase 1A.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: So in thinking about how to implement these allocation principles at a national level, and I actually find this paper to be really helpful because it asks some key questions, a few of which I've pulled out under each of these domains.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So as we're thinking about phase 1A and implementing our healthcare workforce, we're going to ask which groups are at the highest risk for infection, disease, hospitalization, and death, and what are the important characteristics of these groups.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So in thinking about how to apply this to our healthcare workforce, we at Stanford have been reviewing our own data on infection amongst healthcare personnel, in particular by role, in addition to the national data that's provided there on the right, that was published also in MMWR in September, indicating from a national perspective that the greatest are healthcare personnel who are healthcare support workers, such as nursing aides or medical assistants and nurses, carry the highest burden of COVID-19 infection in the US, recognizing, of course, this is not just hospitals, but also nursing and residential care facilities and other ambulatory services.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: I will say at a local level, we have looked at our own data at Stanford and actually found the highest rates of infection among our food service workers and environmental service workers, which, regardless of the source of infection, whether it be from the community or from the healthcare facility, the goal is to really make sure that we're addressing the disproportionate burden in some of our healthcare personnel.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: In addition, we've also discussed considering additional phase one C criteria, as I'm sure you all are as well, such as high-risk medical conditions and age 65 and older.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: But we have recognized as we're deploying these criteria in the healthcare personnel population that those data are not uniformly available to us as employers to be able to know who has what high-risk medical conditions.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, we have talked about whether or not to solicit or ask individuals about whether they meet those criteria.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: But the concern being that by soliciting or asking that, we may not get an even response across all of our healthcare personnel and that we may inadvertently introduce inequities into the way we're allocating vaccines.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: The other challenge is incorporating the risk of exposure in the workplace.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll get to that in a little bit.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of promoting justice, the two questions that I thought were relevant for us for phase 1A is does the allocation plan result in fair and equitable access of the vaccine for all groups?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And how do characteristics of the vaccine and logistical considerations affect fair access for all persons?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you all know about the Pfizer vaccine requiring ultra-cold storage and sort of the complexities regarding implementation of vaccine clinics that are dependent on throughput of that entire box that Pfizer will provide or having ultra-cold freezers to be able to safely store those vaccines.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that in and of itself is a logistical consideration of one of the first vaccines we hope to have available in the US.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: But then thinking a little bit more deeply about what we need to do is thinking about making sure that all of our healthcare workforce have access to vaccines.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: So the shelf life of these vaccines, once constituted, is approximately six hours, and we would not want to waste any doses.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: I will emphasize that any doses that are sitting in our freezers are probably not well used.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to be really important for us to make sure we get as many doses out as quickly as possible because after phase 1A, there's going to be phase 1B and phase 1C, and all of these populations are in high need of these vaccines.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_01: So vaccine clinic hours to ensure access for evening and weekend workers would be one way for us to think about equitable access for our workforce.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um scheduling.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: So online self-scheduling versus phone.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason this is important is because we've learned that not all of our healthcare personnel necessarily have smartphones or the ability to necessarily access.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So making sure that everybody has the ability to access and schedule according to the sequencing that you're planning to do in your healthcare workforce.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: So making sure that you're covering all your bases.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, making sure that all the materials and outreach that we're doing is in multiple languages because we do have a proportion of our healthcare workforce that does not speak English.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: So making sure we have appropriate educational materials, appropriate outreach, and then appropriate access to everyone.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: Mitigating health inequities.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the questions I pulled through here are does the plan identify groups who are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 who face health inequities?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: The second is what health inequities might inadvertently result from the allocation plan.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: So what are we doing in our attempts to achieve equity and actually maximize the benefits and minimize risk?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: We were always going to have to be mindful of the impacts on equity.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And is there a mechanism of timely assessment for vaccine coverage among groups experiencing disadvantage?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: So again, I'll just point back to the idea of using your local data if you have it available or national data to ensure that disproportionately affected healthcare personnel are identified and that you're keeping those populations top of mind early on in your vaccination program.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: The second is to use phase one C criteria, but I want to caution that when we started to run this through our own local models of testing this issue of equity, the high-risk medical conditions for the reasons I mentioned before is we don't think that we'll have complete information and we worried that lower wage workers may be less likely to divulge protected health information to their employer.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So by having that be a criterion, you might inadvertently introduce inequities into the way you're delivering vaccine to your healthcare personnel.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then we actually also ran through a model at Stanford where we were thinking about prioritizing older healthcare workers regardless of job role.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: However, there's a recognition that some of our older workers may be likely to work more remotely.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And when we did this early testing, we recognized that actually we were biasing towards vaccinating a greater proportion of the physician population over nurses or males over females.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: And 77% of our workforce are female, at least nationally.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that made us think twice about, you know, how heavily should we weight that in our decision making.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, it's an easy criteria to fulfill, but you want to make sure that in your early allocation phases that you're really allocating equitably across job roles and equitably by the distribution of COVID-positive infections that you're seeing in your healthcare population.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, I wanted to make the point that I know a lot of the discussions that have been happening at multiple levels has been about risk of exposure in the workplace.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: But I do feel like our healthcare facilities and the hospital epidemiologists on this call have done a phenomenal job mitigating those risks by ensuring that there's appropriate PPE in place, appropriate policies in place to protect our healthcare workforce.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: However, the fear of the risk of exposure is not mitigated by PPE.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's really important for us to remember to follow the data.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: So go back to that data and figure out where your greatest burden of disease is amongst your healthcare workforce.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if we can follow that data, whether you have it locally or at the state level or nationally, I think that'll always guide us back to the place where we're thinking about equitable allocation of vaccines.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, promoting transparency.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, the SHA guidance did this beautifully early on, which is really think about who are the key individuals you would want to have at the table as you're thinking about deploying vaccines in your workplace.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have actually created a specific guiding principles work group or essentially an early vaccine allocation work group led by our ethicists.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And specifically to ensure that at Stanford we could establish what would be the guiding principles for Stanford as an institution, Stanford Medicine across our institutions to ensure fair and equitable allocation of vaccines to our workforce.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted this group to collaborate with our operations team on planning because, as you know, we can make recommendations at ACIP or we can make recommendations at a hospital level or at the hospital leadership level.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it's actually how it's operationalized and implemented that will really define whether or not we're able to adhere to our principles.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: So paying attention to how it's operationalized is really important.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And then developing a monitoring plan for equity that accounts for intentional phasing.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I say this because it's going to be really important for us to ensure that we have equitable allocation of vaccines.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: But as many of you know, we're anticipating that the early vaccines, or maybe we'll see what the future vaccines, local and systemic reactions are common, as they are with all vaccines.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: But in this case, with our upcoming mRNA vaccines, some of the systemic side effects will include, for example, fever, which will impact our workforce and their ability to work, because we don't want people coming in febrile, even though it's likely a post-vaccination systemic reaction.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we are going to have to intentionally phase that regardless.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: So even though we might think a particular job role or a particular location is a priority group, we're going to have to think about how to make sure you're not vaccinating everyone in a single unit or an entire job role, like all your environmental services staff at the exact same time, because they could all go out with systemic reactions at the exact same time.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: And given where we are with healthcare capacity and where we are in the pandemic, it's going to be really important to ensure we can maintain a sufficient workforce capacity.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: Hence the staggering of these vaccines in terms of rolling it out by location or job role will be really important.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: You could also consider other demographic information as it's available if it's important for you to just track on how well you're doing from an equity standpoint.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that could include things like age and gender, race, ethnicity.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: But again, not all of those characteristics are available to us necessarily in our HR system.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll have to just go through a discussion locally about what makes the most sense from an equity standpoint.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, I think an important role of this particular group is to engage and communicate with our workforce about principles and process.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And because so much of what we're going to be facing, I think on the one hand, are people who are extremely eager to get vaccines and want to be first in line.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And on the other hand, I also worry about those who are very worried about vaccines and don't want to get in line.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so making sure at least that there's a sense of, well, here are the key principles for how we're thinking about the early allocation of these vaccines, but also how are we educating our workforce together to ensure vaccine confidence.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: So in thinking about the Stanford approach to implementation, and we're still in discussion, so none of this is final, but I'm just going to share our thought process through this because I thought it would be helpful for others.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we had talked about at a very detailed level, excluding initially from allocations healthcare personnel who already had plans in place to work 100% remotely until spring or summer.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: We do have a proportion of our workforce where they can wait and we would have sufficient vaccines available by that time to vaccinate anybody who wants to get vaccinated.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: Our goal is to communicate to everybody.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone will have access to a vaccine.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that we have to sequence it according to whatever our supply looks like.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of the other questions that have often come up for us, and this was included on the ACIP website as a clinical consideration, is a consideration to not exclude per se, but sort of delay vaccination amongst healthcare providers with vaccines in the prior 90 days for each wave.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So as you're going up against wave one, and let's say you're starting to vaccinate next week, perhaps if you know some of your healthcare workforce was positive in the last 90 days, delaying their vaccination until they're past that 90 day mark might be a reasonable thing to consider.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a contraindication, but it is something that makes logistical sense, I think, particularly as we're waiting for wave one to come through and we don't know how many doses we'll get.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: The other is to consider a simple model that incorporates local or national data on COVID-positive healthcare personnel.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And again, would go back to the where are your positivity rates, regardless of the source of transmission.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: What's really important is that we're protecting the capacity and our ability for our healthcare systems to respond to the pandemic.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so it doesn't really matter if you got exposed in the community or exposed in the workplace.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: What really matters is that we need our workforce here and present to be able to help us get through the pandemic.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: You could consider demographic information within each job or location.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: So one way to avoid the potential inequity or considerations that we were talking about or disparities early on would be to say within each job or location, if you know that you might have older individuals or whatever it may be, you could consider in that substrata trying to go that way.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: This requires a lot of effort and a lot of information.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I will say that I am feeling like because we are anticipating enough doses will be available for all healthcare personnel, we hope by the end of January.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: The way we're thinking about it is in four waves, which we think will take about four to six weeks in total.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we're having to vaccinate all of our healthcare workforce as quickly as possible and on an even tighter timeframe than we usually do for flu vaccine.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the logistics of getting all these people through our clinics is actually on the plus side, because we need to stagger the units or teams to avoid workforce capacity issues, we may not need to overthink the prioritization scheme and instead just focus on sequencing and phasing.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: So while I do think it's important for us to communicate the guiding principles, I also think it's important for us not to get hung up on having a perfect model or perfectly allocating vaccines accordingly, because our intent is to vaccinate everybody we can in the next four weeks or six weeks, depending on how quickly vaccines come through.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm hearing some facilities might be through their entire workforce in one to two weeks.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So just depending on where your state is.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of the last component of this is really promoting vaccine confidence.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And all of us know this, but I just wanted to emphasize that point is I feel strongly that all of our healthcare workforce are valuable members of the team.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so while we talk a lot about who should we prioritize or who should go first, I actually don't think the conversation should go that way.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: I really think we should talk more about phasing or sequencing and talk about the fact that our intent is to vaccinate anybody who wants a vaccine.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: And rather our considerations, honestly, for the most part at Stanford are logistical, is really just like how do we get people into these waves, make sure they come through, and make sure that we're not knocking out an entire intensive care unit or whatever the unit is at the same time.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, because of that, I think that it becomes less concerning to me that we're gonna be focused on who's at risk versus who's not at risk, other than the most obvious categories.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll try and go a little bit more quickly, but I did want to share some of the discussions at the national level around vaccine safety monitoring for COVID-19 vaccines and what you should know.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I wanted to bring this to this group is because all of you are setting up workplace vaccination clinics in your healthcare facilities.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of information coming at us in the next week and then the next two weeks that we'll have to integrate quickly.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So think of this as sort of anticipatory guidance of what to expect.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: For those of you who have been following the ACIP meetings, you'll all know that there are many systems that are going to be stood up as a complement to be able to monitor a COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this slide here shows the early phase of what we hope to stand up as soon as vaccines are deployed.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: VSafe is one particular system that you've been hearing about probably in the news and at ACIP meetings.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this is really a system where CDC has developed a text messaging app for smartphones to encourage individuals who receive vaccine to self-enroll in vSAFE.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this could include our healthcare personnel, this could include patients, this could include anybody, essential workers, whoever you want.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Think of this as a direct-to-consumer.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: However, we obviously, as vaccinators, will play an important role in making sure people are aware that the system exists.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: While we will not be necessarily enrolling those patients, giving them the information they need to enroll would be helpful.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And essentially it'll monitor local and systemic reactions in the first week and then continue to ping them and monitor for any other adverse events that maybe affect their ability to work or anything else that they want to report.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a team behind that that would actively follow up if there's anything significant that people are reporting.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: The second is this idea that DOD, VA, and NHSN will be supporting enhanced reporting into Vayors.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: So VAYERS is a national system that's co-managed by CDC and FDA that basically allows anyone to report any potential adverse events, significant, non-significant, related, not related, well, hopefully temporally related at least, into the system for further investigation.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it is one of the major systems we rely on for early signal identification in the US.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, the Rhoda Shield vaccine and Vayers is a great example of something that the Vayor system was able to pick up quickly.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then the teams were able to go and investigate, and the subsequent decisions were made about the risk for interseception following the original Rhoda Shield vaccine.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this is a very powerful system, and we are very much encouraging not only providers who are delivering to their patients to report to Vayers if they are aware of any significant adverse events that occur, but also are asking our facilities, our healthcare facilities.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: All of the folks on this call are very familiar with the National Healthcare Safety Network.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll get into the details later, but NHSN will be hosting COVID-19 vaccination modules, similar to the flu vaccination modules for acute care facilities and long-term care facilities.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And these are, again, just aggregate data, not individual level data.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I think this is going to be really helpful for CDC and our country if our facilities are willing to support surveillance in these systems to help monitor adverse events in particular.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then finally, there's a system called CISA that again has been around for decades.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a group of really talented clinicians who are trained to really provide clinical consultation around individual cases that providers may have.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I have personally actually gone to them with a request to review something of a potential adverse event.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And what they do is they bring all the right experts to that group and they actually essentially provide a consultation to me as a clinician about what I need to do with that adverse event.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: So just something to be aware of.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And again, everything has been enhanced and will be activated at a quite a different scale with COVID-19 vaccines.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: I won't go into this, but this is just to say there are many other systems that are coming online that we anticipate will continue to monitor vaccine safety.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: These are not systems that we will necessarily need to actively do anything to support, but I wanted to just let you know that at least the early parts of the systems we are hoping that our teams can support.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: For NHSN, as you know, it's an existing system for monitoring our usual healthcare associated infections, but there is a healthcare worker immunization module.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: There are 4,700 acute care hospitals and 17,000 long-term care facilities currently enrolled in NHSN.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: The COVID-19 vaccine reporting, we anticipate the acute care hospital reporting for healthcare personnel and some long-term care facilities.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: This is just for the personnel, will be available by mid-December.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: So just as the vaccines are rolling out.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then by early to mid-January, their hope is to be able to also roll out a module for nursing home resident vaccinations.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we can again be able to track safety on the nursing home residents.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: The modules are fairly simple.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're used to NHSN, this will just be the we would need to know this anyway, I'll just say frankly, as is health systems.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: So how many eligible people are in our facility, how many people got the vaccine doses, whether it's first dose or received both doses, and then specifically a little bit of a manual link to bears for adverse event reporting.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: But when you report into the NHSN modules, the data will be available to jurisdictions as it usually is.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the thing that I wanted this group to be aware of, and it's a details thing, but I know this group actually cares about the details as well, which is this might be what you see in the NHSN system.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And this is not a final version by any means.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: So please wait for the official final version.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: But you'll see here that there'll be a comment that adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines, we want to know if they're clinically significant.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Please identify this and report how many people had a significant adverse event in a given week, in addition to the denominator of vaccinees.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And it'll ask you to go and report into beyors.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll have to go into a separate system, but all of our Alcal teams usually are already reporting into beyors regardless.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: The one thing I just wanted to note is that we would ask that the NHSN org ID be placed in box 26.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Again, this is a very detailed thing, but really helpful for us because then we'll be able to link some of the bearers reporting to the NHSN populations.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually think that's going to be really powerful for us early on since healthcare personnel are going to be receiving the first vaccines of the US.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Bears, this just gives you whether it's you're caring for patients or your patients want to self-report.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: You can also just report into beyors directly.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, like the NHSN is at the facility level, VERS is at the provider level or the patient level.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really easy to find it on the website.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can submit a report online.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then this is the CISA project consult service for COVID-19 vaccine safety that I mentioned.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a plug from our CDC colleagues to just ask that healthcare systems help get the word out to facilities and providers.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And this is specific to vSAFE.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: This again is direct to consumer as a way to think about it.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll be asked to let people know about vSAFE and what it's for.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And there will be packages, I understand, that will allow us to be able to integrate this into our vaccine clinic workflow, both for healthcare personnel and patients.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: More soon, hopefully from the CDC on that.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned the NHSN, which you're all familiar with, VAIRS, which will really be at the provider level.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if we can do those things, it will be incredibly helpful for us in these early weeks of the vaccination program to be able to not only ensure we're monitoring vaccine safety, but hopefully also promote vaccine confidence in the system.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much to Dr.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Lee for sharing this important information.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: In addition, the Shay Statement for Healthcare Settings Preparing for COVID-19 vaccination has been updated as of December 7th.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: The SHA statement was authored by experts, Drs.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Marcy Drees, Grace Lee, Deborah Yuccoe, and David Weber.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: The statement was first published in October, and the update incorporates recent developments as the vaccines have progressed through the approval process.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast can be accessed on SHA's online education center learning CE under the Rapid Response Program.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: You will also find resources such as the recorded webinars, healthcare facility outbreak preparedness, and the SHA COVID-19 town halls.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can now receive 50% off the 2021 SHA membership using the coupon code WelcomeTwenty Twenty One.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: That concludes this episode of the Rapid Response Podcast.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for tuning in.