When TCU successfully mobilized COVID-19 vaccination clinics last year, organizers drew from over a decade of mass immunization experience in the Harris College of Nursing & Health Sciences. For their Doctor of Nursing Practice project, Chau Andersen and Minakshi Bansal, both graduate students in the DNP program and Family Nurse Practitioner program, are taking the initiative a step further by developing an evidence-based mass immunization toolkit to share TCU’s expertise with other universities.
“While the task of immunizing volumes of people can seem overwhelming, TCU public health nursing has been working on this task for several years and has developed a very efficient, effective and relatively simple method for mass vaccinations,” said Sharon Canclini, assistant professor of professional practice, who serves as designer and lead faculty of the TCU mass immunization clinics.
“Following the COVID pandemic, the TCU mass immunization method was used with specific adjustments to expedite vaccine delivery and limit exposures with great success,” she said. “Follow-up COVID clinics used the TCU method of mass delivery successfully. After 12 years of experience and hundreds of thousands of successful vaccine doses delivered, it is time to share this information with other communities.”
The DNP project requires students to apply evidence-based interventions in an innovative way. Beginning their project last spring, Andersen and Bansal pored over research articles and numerous student notebooks detailing TCU’s mass immunization efforts, interviewed stakeholders, observed campus vaccination clinics and researched procedures of other universities and departments like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The “toolkit” does not consist of physical items, rather a stepwise description of how to plan and execute a mass immunization program. Upon the project’s completion at the end of the semester, TCU plans on piloting the toolkit with Southern Methodist University and sharing it further at conferences.
Aside from the time constraints of balancing work, school and family, the biggest challenge has been dealing with COVID-19 rules and regulations, said Andersen, a native of Saigon, Vietnam, who came to the United States after high school in 2010, earned a Bachelor of Science in nursing from TCU in 2016 and expects to graduate with a doctor of nursing practice and family nurse practitioner in May.
“COVID-19 creates many challenges for planning a mass-immunization event, such as space, indoor versus outdoor setting and registration,” Andersen said. “However, COVID gave us the opportunity to be creative while coming up with a toolkit that is suitable for any kind of vaccine.”
Bansal earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing in New Delhi, India, before coming to the U.S. and expects to graduate with a DNP-FNP this summer. She believes the toolkit is essential.
“Every university campus should have such a toolkit to direct their teams and help in running a successful immunization program,” Bansal said “Our project delivers a structured, evidence-based toolkit for mass immunization at university campuses, and it can be modified according to the settings of other universities.”
Canclini has served as content expert, coach and guide as Andersen and Bansal build their project from idea to reality.
“In addition to learning about the basics of mass immunization, the graduate students had to garner an understanding of the value of the lived experience of past students and how those experiences impact the project outcomes,” Canclini said. “For example, TCU leadership strongly embraces primary prevention actions by public health nursing students, but that trust was earned and developed over time.”
She said the understanding was discovered by the graduate students by reading the many notebooks of documentation of past clinic projects.
“While it is a good idea to mass vaccinate, it takes the trust and support of the community to make such events happen successfully,” she said.