Vaccination Alliance formed

The Washington County Public Health Department is starting a vaccination alliance with health care providers in the county.

"It's a new group that we're pulling together and it's going to be pharmacists in the county and someone from all of the doctors' offices," said Washington County Public Health nurse Lynn Fisher, "and eventually we think we'll expand it to school nurses as well."

The idea to form a vaccination alliance came from one of the immunization grant applications the public health department filled out last fall, Fisher added.

"This was one of the outcomes we could use from our immunization grant," Fisher said. "We had several choices ? I think we had four choices but we chose that one because it did dovetail so nicely with our other pandemic plan."

They received the grant in January, Washington County Public Health administrator Danielle Pettit-Majewski said.

The first meeting was held last week and the response was good, she added.

"It was really exciting because a lot of these partners that we have in the community have never been in the same room togther," Pettit-Majewski said. "It was really good to talk about 'what are your practices during influenza season' and 'what are your practices just in emergency preparedness? What are your thoughts and what would you do?' "

The main goal for the group is to develop a plan in case a pandemic were to come to Washington County.

"Try to develop these strategies before the pandemic arrives," Fisher said, "getting methods in place for vaccine distribution [and] vaccine administration. We want to develop processes that we can monitor our pandemic and also strengthen our relationships with all these partners and also contain the epidemic."

Another goal is to have a simulation exercise where the vaccination alliance acts as if a pandemic is happening in the county, Fisher added.

"We know an emergency preparedness consultant, so we're going to reach out to him to help lead it," she said, "and we're also going to reach out to other departments of public health to be there."

They will also work on resource allocation.

"In the event with a pandemic you're going to have limited resources and high demand," Pettit-Majewski said. "We really want to make sure we're tracking those limited resources appropriately so that somebody isn't getting vaccinated twice or somebody who shouldn't be getting the vaccine because they don't meet the criteria so that we're utilizing the resources that we have to the best of our ability."

A date hasn't been set for the exercise yet, Fisher said. The next meeting will be scheduled for next January and the pandemic exercise will be scheduled for next spring, Fisher said.