Vaccination clinic at Harrowsmith Free Methodist Church for patients of Sydenham, Verona Medical Centres

Jeff Green | Apr 07, 2021

“Don't say snow,” said Amanda Antoine last Wednesday morning (March 31), “there will be no snow tomorrow.”

Antoine is not a meteorologist. She works at the Verona Medical Centre, and had spent 5 days on the phone, talking to every patient of the clinic who is over 70 about attending a vaccination clinic on Thursday (April 1) at the Harrowsmith Free Methodist Church. (HMFC)

People had been receptive to her calls.

“Many of the people I talked to, the majority of them, had already been vaccinated or already had made an appointment to be vaccinated. Among those who hadn't, just about all of them were happy to get the vaccine in our own community this week,” she said.

Dr. Sabra Gibbens, who heads the Verona Centre, said that the exercise of calling all those patients was worthwhile in itself.

“We needed to know where they were at, with the vaccine, and how they were doing, and they appreciated hearing from us as well. But it was a lot of work for Amanda, and of course all of the other work of the clinic had to be carried on at the same time as these calls were being made. People have other medical needs, that never goes away.

Fortunately, apart from a lazy flake or two, the predicted snow on Wednesday night into Thursday morning did not come to pass.

At 9:30am, the church parking lot was full. Specialists from the Strathcona Centre mass clinic had started arriving, two hours earlier, to prepare almost 300 doses of Pfizer vaccine, and other Strathcona staff, and other public health and paramedic services personnel, arrived steadily over the next two hours, to organise the clinic. Volunteers were still arriving at 9:30 to get their assignments and be ready for when the first patient was set to arrive at 10am.

This was the first pop-up mobile clinic that the Strathcona crew had set up, and it took some quick thinking and organising to get everything ready. Safety protocols were in place and patients who arrived for their appointments, no more than 10 minutes early as per instructions, were welcomed into the gym, at the church, for their injections.

As people arrived, Dr. Gibbens said, “it is quite something. These are my people, the people I care for, and after a year at home waiting, to see them get a vaccine that will provide them a path back to their normal lives is a really big deal.”

The clinic was co-sponsored by the Verona and Sydenham Medical Centres. Meredith Prikker, a nurse at the Sydenham Centre, had organised patients from Sydenham, in a process that was similar to the one that took place in Verona. She also made the arrangements with the Free Methodist Church, which the Sydenham Medical Centre used as the location for flu shots clinics last fall.

“It took a lot of coordination, a lot of phone calls, to get this done. The church is always very supportive and, in the end, we were able to offer up the clinic to patients from the Tamworth Medical Centre as well,” said Prikker.

Dr. Gibbens said that “my instinct, when I heard that the vaccine had been approved, was to get some right away and get out to my patients’ homes and give them injections, but this vaccine is not like that. There is an adage, if you want to do something fast, do it yourself, but if you want to make a difference over a long time, you have to work with others. This is a long-term thing: vaccinating everyone in the community. We need to work together, with Public Health doing a lot of coordinating, to make it happen. And it takes time.”