Community Health Providers Take the Lead on Vaccinations

By Robert Davis

Karla Carranza of Denver said she got her COVID-19 vaccine because she was ready to reunite with her family and friends after spending a year apart. 

Dr. Hannah Fields of Estes Park got hers to protect both her family and her patients. 

Stephanie Flores from Fort Lupton said she got it because her work as a medical provider puts her in close contact with the public. 

What each of these women has in common is that they got their vaccines from the Salud Family Health Clinic, a community health center that focuses on helping Colorado’s low-income and immigrant communities get vaccinated. 

As Colorado’s vaccination rate increases, community health centers like Salud are becoming more than medical offices. They are now off-hours service providers, trusted sources of information, and community resource centers, too.

They’re also serving as lynchpins of the state’s vaccination efforts. 

Maisha Fields, the director of community partnerships at Salud Family Health Centers, described this workload to Denver VOICE in an interview as “heavy.” But, she’s found the key to success lies in “connecting with people where they are.”

“Normal health care comes with normal business hours. Rather than be another normal provider, we aim to be a trusted provider. We’re able to adjust our method of delivery to meet the needs of our community members,” Fields added.  

Vaccine Equity

According to the Centers for Disease Control, only 10% of vaccines distributed in Colorado have gone to Hispanic and Latinx communities. Meanwhile, these communities made up 41% of cases and 25% of deaths, according to an analysis of the data by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The song remains the same in the Denver metro area. Communities with strong Hispanic and Latinx populations such as Montbello and Westwood are reporting low vaccination rates, according to the Colorado Health Institute’s COVID-19 Vaccination Map. 

To address these disparities, Denver opened five community vaccination centers at the following locations:

·      Barnum Recreation Center - 360 Hooker St.

·      Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation center - 2650 E. 49th Ave.

·      Swansea Recreation Center - 2650 E. 49th Ave.

·      John F. Kennedy High School - 2855 S. Lamar St.

·      Montbello High School - 14274 E. 51st Ave.

However, these statistics confirm the fact that several communities in Colorado are not getting the quality of healthcare they deserve, according to Fields. She said that’s why Salud and other community healthcare centers are focusing their efforts on culturally-responsive services in an attempt to increase vaccination rates.  

Some examples include hosting vaccination drives during the evening or on weekends; driving mobile clinics to churches, parks, and other community centers, and providing walk-in vaccinations. 

Fields said there have been two keys to Salud’s success: flexible services and building trust in the communities they serve. 

“It’s not always the voices of the sports stars that people listen to. That’ll work for some, but others will pay more attention to what their neighbor says than what someone on the Denver Broncos says about getting vaccinated,” she said.  

Information Pipeline

When Governor Jared Polis retired the state’s COVID-19 dial framework in mid-April, he simultaneously gave local healthcare providers more control over case management and disrupted an information pipeline that many relied on for local data about the pandemic. 

At the time, officials said the decision was due to several factors, including increased vaccination rates and lower hospitalization rates of elderly Coloradans. In response, several counties—Denver included—made their COVID-19 data publicly available. Others, such as Douglas County took the opposite approach. 

However, the patchwork county-level data available, coupled with sensationalized reports of complications caused by the vaccine have made it difficult to repair the information pipeline between scientists and the general public. 

For community health providers, Fields said, closing this information gap between vulnerable communities and sound science is a critical element of their work.

Chief Medical Officer for Salud Tillman Farley told Denver VOICE about some focus groups that Salud has conducted. He said those who self-reported as vaccine-hesitant often believed that scientists had a profit motive behind the inoculation. Others were distrustful of medicine more generally. 

He said these results made one thing resoundingly clear: those who are vaccine-hesitant are becoming tougher sells. Unfortunately, the result is that people distrust an element of medicine that scientists know best: vaccines. 

“There is nothing that medicine knows better than vaccines, from the molecular level to the population level,” Farley said. “Immunology is very sound science. There aren’t any hidden dragons left to discover. We’re only getting better at it.”

Meanwhile, state COVID data shows Denver County has more than 450 confirmed cases of variant strains – three-fourths of which are from the B.1.1.7 strain, which was first identified in the United Kingdom. 

According to the latest vaccination data from Denver Public Health, 63% of Denver residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Another 43% are fully vaccinated.