LEXINGTON, Ky. — With the increase in the amount of available vaccines, UK Healthcare is extending their Saturday vaccination hours by five hours to allow the clinic to vaccinate more Kentuckians.
After a little over a week of providing a walk-in vaccination clinic at Kroger Field, the Dean of UK College of Medicine, Dr. Robert Dipaola said with the extra help from the department, they are able to vaccinate around 1,000 more Kentuckians a week.
“Having the College of Medicine faculty, staff and students come today we were able to extend the hours, so that there'd be more doses for people in the community through today so we're going to extend the hours till 6pm and we have our medical students here who are very eager to serve,” Dipaola said.
Dipaola worked with one of the senior faculty members in the Department of Surgery, Dr. Joseph Zwischenberger to gather students and faculty volunteers.
“I immediately put out a call to the medical students. And the response overwhelmingly, it crashed our sign up site. And so we had to limit it. So right now the students that you see are the happy ones and the ones you don't see are very disappointed they couldn't be here,” Zwischenberger said.
Due to capacity restrictions, Zwischenberger was only allowed to accept 14 students to help in different areas within the clinic.
“We also made sure that we had a faculty member to supervise each one of the students, so everyone has a faculty member right next to them making sure that they're doing everything correctly. We also immediately set up a refresher course from our simulation labs, the students can go in if they hadn't given an injection in a while they could practice and refresh themselves,” Zwischenberger said.
For one UK Medical Student, Elizabeth Hansen says being able to volunteer has impacted her in many ways. One specific way was when her father got vaccinated earlier this week.
“He's only got his first shot and that was very recently, it just was like a huge weight off my shoulders. And that's really when it really was driven home, but then getting to watch that experience patient after patient coming in to get their vaccine. You know, I had a couple people where it really brings them to tears," Hansen said.
Along with the Saturday vaccination hours from 9 a.m.- 6 p.m., the vaccination clinic will also operate Tuesday through Friday from 9 a.m. - 7 p.m.