The University of Chicago developed a system in April 2009 for having students assist with education and management in H1N1 vaccine clinics. The students, called Peer Health Educators, or PHEs, worked in the clinics while providing key hygiene and self-care education information to people throughout campus.
"Our PHEs were fabulous! We couldn't have done it without them," said Dr. Kristine Bordenave, Director, Student Care Center (SCC). She said PHEs attended a two-week training program about immunization, disease prevention, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and were willing to work with the health promotion team to teach other health-related subjects.
The PHEs assisted with crowd control, as well as distributing vaccination forms and information. The forms included demographic information, vaccination and allergy history, past medical conditions, exposure history, risk factors for H1N1 complications and current prescriptions before vaccinations were administered. Peer educators were deployed repeatedly to mass vaccination clinics around campus, helping each medical provider to vaccinate between 60 and 70 persons per hour, Bordenave said.
She said students responded well to either PHEs or medical providers while older patients were more concerned with the PHEs, largely out of fear that the information from PHEs might not be accurate. PHEs did provide credible information, were tested for medical knowledge, and are on track for a career in public health or medicine/science. "Outbreaks like this one provide a new rapidly evolving puzzle piece to the healthcare delivery system and the PHEs, one of our greatest assets, made it possible for us to respond well even though we were working with limited resources."
University health planners preferred the one-on-one interaction between PHEs and patients as opposed to a Internet-based approach. Bordenave said she and her team found that whenever they took appointments or questions online, patients were coming to the clinic often had forgotten their forms.
She said it was helpful to conduct H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccination in separate areas. "This minimized vaccine errors and streamlined the process. Patients spoke with a PHE and then were asked to complete the form for the vaccine performed in that area.
U of C is beginning to study how to meet the needs of individuals in the broader community surrounding the university during and emergency or pandemic. The SCC director said any university that can attach itself to a medical center with an infectious disease epidemiologist should do so. "It is much easier than trying to scramble to get that information from other resources such as public health department, which are already stretched beyond capacity during a crisis or outbreak like H1N1," Bordenave said.