Students volunteer to help with vaccinations

It may not have been part of the curriculum when they signed up, but some Arizona State University health care majors are getting their share of real-world experience in the pandemic. Students are volunteering with the university’s vaccination site and they are moving thousands of people through a complex and historic health care mission in the process. Javier Ramos, who host Susan Lisovicz spoke with on Monday, is one of those students.

Ramos explained the student’s job during this process as, “We were registering patients to come in, having their appointments set up. Basically tell them where to sit down, clean up their stations, helping them out when it came to uploading their vaccination reports to the ASU portal, and managing bio-waste and any hazards.”

He continued to say, “Our goal is pretty much to do 500 vaccinations per day, two days a week. Practically it simplifies to had we our patients sit down, they would come in with their advertised time, we had everybody running smoothly. We had people telling them where to go, make them sit down and just try to get everything going as smoothly as possible and get them out as quickly as we can.”

When asked about the importance of access Ramos responded, “Access is very important, especially when it comes to a global pandemic in which we want to start moving forward, we want life coming back to normality. Giving out and distributing these vaccines to as many people as we can is probably our primary goal right now.”

This has been a difficult time for a lot of people and Ramos says begin involved in the vaccination process has helped.

“It makes me feel pretty proud about my community, it makes me proud of ASU and their student leadership that there are people out there that are willing to put their part in.”