Marina Martinez, Program Manager
We are proud to share our hardworking cohort 5 clinics have reduced their missed vaccination opportunities by a median of 13% across 12 clinics halfway through the intervention period.
The most common interventions across clinics are reminder recall, posters, and staff training. All of our clinics implemented reminder recall to get to get kids vaccinated before the back to school rush, with 9 of our 12 clinics creating and hanging a poster as their intervention. When paired with staff training to reference the poster and provide a strong recommendation, staff says, “It’s like there is a second recommendation in the room.” Parents will even bring up vaccines before providers, referencing the poster. Some additional successes include:
- Swedish Renton won several Immunize WA awards this year due to their team’s hard work and success in our Immunization Learning Collaborative with their stellar coach, Dr. Sherri Zorn.
- One of Kadlec’s interventions was to train medical assistants (MAs) on how to utilize their immunization schedule poster to give a strong vaccine recommendation. Since they have both native English- and Spanish-speaking MAs, they found missed opportunities for both English- and especially Spanish-speaking patients dropped dramatically.
Similar to most clinics, our WA-CHIP cohort 5 clinics biggest challenge is being short staffed.
“Learning from other clinics has helped us with morale. When we are down staff, communication across the team helps us keep our focus on immunizations.”
Valley View Health Center
The WA-CHIP coaches uniquely design the experience in the cohort to support each clinic. Joining the immunization learning collaborative may seem intimidating, but in reality, you have quality improvement coaches and Seattle Children’s thought leaders in vaccine hesitancy to lean on for help. Learn from other clinics and access hundreds of resources to increase child and adolescent immunization rates.
“This is my favorite QI project I’ve done. I love the coaching element; you are so thoughtful. I see the WA-CHIP team improving along the way to make it [the Immunization Learning Collaborative] better.”
Olympia Pediatrics
This project helps clinics implement meaningful, feasible and sustained focus on childhood and adolescent vaccines, with MOC part 4 credit and CME credits available. Our initiative also includes an equity lens to support each participating clinic to identify health care gaps for their patient population by race, ethnicity, and language.
In 2022, Cohort 4 saw a median of 25.5% reduction in missed opportunities in clinics across the state. Our Cohort 5 clinics are working hard and we can’t wait to share their results in the new year.
If you are interested in joining WCAAP’s upcoming Immunization Learning Collaborative for Cohort 6, please contact mmartinez@wcaap.org for more information or check out our recruitment flyer for additional details.