ECRI Q&A provides lessons learned on vaccine rollout

It might take weeks or months before the U.S. gets the COVID-19 vaccine out to all of those who want it. The CDC and most states are first offering the shots to healthcare workers and other essential personnel.

Whether you are a hospital or off-campus location, you must take several key precautions both with administering the vaccine and ensuring the safety of its storage and handling.

Be extra careful with the vaccine and with the dry ice that will keep it cold—mishandling the dry ice can cause injury and even death, warned Ramya Krishnan, senior project engineer of device evaluations for ECRI, during the patient safety organization’s online Q&A session on December 16, 2020.

Also, think through how you will schedule and move patients through your facility, advised David Watson, vice president of ECRI’s European operations. Watson is based in the United Kingdom, where the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were administered on December 8.

You will need space to take a patient history (including any previous allergic or anaphylactic reactions to food, drugs, or insects), to administer the vaccine, to provide at least 15 minutes of observation for adverse reactions afterward, and an area to care for anyone who does have a reaction—all while maintaining the same social-distancing and infectious-disease precautions you’ve had since the pandemic began, he noted.

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