A Look Back: Public Health Nurses' Impact on UK's COVID-19 Vaccine Efforts
Pictured above: Dr. Hartley Feld at UK's Field
In honor of National Public Health Week 2022, we are recognizing the impact of public health nurses during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The below article was written for and featured in the UK College of Nursing's Fall 2021 edition of Engagement.
The University of Kentucky’s Kroger Field became the epicenter of the state’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts in January 2021 when UK HealthCare moved beyond frontline medical staff members and began vaccinating educators and the elderly.
The shift in focus necessitated a massive influx of volunteers, including dozens of vaccinators—people with the ability to administer an intramuscular vaccine and do so quickly and safely. The person in charge of leading operations for the UK College of Nursing’s volunteer roster for Kroger Field COVID-19 Clinic was Hartley Feld, a global public health expert and assistant professor.
“Hartley was there from day one, and although she’s got a million-and-one other things going on with her teaching and research, she never says no,” says Dr. Gwen Moreland, chief nurse executive at UK
HealthCare. “Honestly, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we did without her help and the many student and faculty volunteers she brought from the College of Nursing.”
UK College of Nursing Dean Janie Heath recruited Dr. Feld to serve as a volunteer liaison for Kroger Field not long after Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear announced that the state would begin vaccinating the general public. Due to the sheer number of people who needed vaccinations, Beshear asked faculty, staff and students in the Colleges of Nursing, Medicine, Health Sciences, Dentistry and Pharmacy to help with vaccination efforts. Feld says she was eager to get involved.
“Like a lot of people, I was ready to put the pandemic behind me,” she says. “It felt remarkably productive and meaningful to be so involved with the Kroger Field vaccination effort— the largest vaccination center in the state.”
The immense size of the football stadium, which seats 61,000, made it the perfect location for socially distanced vaccination
stations, and the large parking lot made it easy for people to park their vehicles and access the vaccination center. Many people who came to Kroger Field to get their
vaccination drove from other parts of the state, sometimes traveling several hours one way.
The stories you’d hear from people who got
vaccinated is something that I wasn’t prepared for, but it became one of the big draws
for many volunteers, including myself,” says Dr. Feld.
“You would hear stories from grandparents who were finally going to be able to meet a new grandbaby or from people who could finally check off a trip from their bucket list. Some just wanted to hug and socialize in person; some were in tears talking about the relief of fear and burden being lifted from their daily lives.”
A HERCULEAN EFFORT
When Dr. Feld first started recruiting College of Nursing volunteers for Kroger Field, it was on a small scale, but as site activity ramped up, she was responsible for assuring 20 volunteer vaccinators four days a week, Tuesday through Friday, and 10 vaccinators on Saturday (the site is closed Sunday and Monday).
It’s an amazing operation, especially considering that not one person waited for more than 30 minutes to receive a vaccine,” she says. “There were days when we had 4,000 people come through the doors, and they all left with a vaccination.”
Besides organizing volunteers from the College of Nursing, Dr. Feld and colleagues from the College of Public Health created tutorials and refreshers on how to give a deltoid intramuscular injection properly. She shared these training materials with her counterparts in the colleges of Dentistry and Medicine. Dr. Feld said the tutorials helped volunteers feel confident on their first day at the vaccination site, including nursing students.
“Because of the pandemic, some of [the nursing students’] clinical opportunities had been scaled back,” says Dr. Feld. “So, it was great for them to have this opportunity. I think a lot of them just appreciated the human contact.”
Students also learned about interprofessional teamwork between doctors, dentists and pharmacists, as well as a bit of pandemic history. Patients of a certain age often asked for their COVID-19 vaccine to be administered in the same spot as their smallpox vaccine. It’s easy to tell where people had their smallpox vaccine because of the small scar on their arm. Younger nursing students didn’t have these scars because they were never inoculated against smallpox, which was eradicated in the U.S.
“Students realized that this was a huge moment in history, and they were proud to be a part of it,” says Dr. Feld.
Nadja Nelson was one such student. Nelson is assisting Dr. Feld with a project that is taking a closer look at sudden infant death syndrome in Ecuador. Nelson says Dr. Feld encouraged all of her students to volunteer at Kroger Field.
“Professor Feld is hands-on and very encouraging to all of her students,” says Nelson, who is earning her bachelor’s in nursing. “I think it’s admirable that she signed up to help with the vaccination clinic, especially knowing how busy she is with her teaching and research.”
THE RIGHT PERSON FOR THE JOB
Dr. Feld has long been admired for her dedication to nursing and to helping those around her. Dr. Moreland, who worked with Dr. Feld as an OB-GYN nurse when the two women were first starting out, isn’t surprised that Dr. Feld stepped up to help with the vaccination process.
“It made sense to all of us that the College of Nursing should be involved once the decision was made to expand the vaccination effort,” says Dr. Moreland, who works with hospital officials and others to coordinate UK HealthCare’s vaccination efforts. “Hartley and her volunteers have been front and center from the beginning.”
Although other health care colleges have also participated in the vaccination effort, the College of Nursing provided volunteers every day and hosted several “mega days,” when they would assign even more volunteers than usual. Dr. Feld estimates that approximately 450 volunteers from the College of Nursing—students, faculty and staff combined—volunteered more than 3,500 hours to vaccinate 21,000 Kentuckians in the first six weeks of Kroger Field’s clinic operations.
The mix of professionals from different ends of the health care spectrum also helped to forge new connections and respect. And it has shown everyone the power of human generosity and teamwork.
Who’s going to tell the stories that will need to be told about the COVID-19 pandemic?” asks Dr. Feld. “Our students will tell that story, and what a story to tell.”
