Student Pharmacist Outreach to Underserved People Builds Vaccine Confidence

As a PharmD candidate at UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Aliyah Cruz visits a local mental health facility once a week to spend an hour talking with patients about COVID-19 vaccines. The patient education group is part of a research project on which Cruz is working with another student pharmacist and two faculty members.

“Both patients who are racial minorities and those who have mental illnesses can be very vulnerable. Our project hits many people that may fall into both groups, and we’re allowing them a safe space to talk freely,” Cruz said.

During the weekly visits, Cruz and her research partners meet with a different group of patients each time. They discuss everything from the basics, such as how the vaccine works, to how vaccines gain FDA approval, as well as common misinformation that many patients have heard.

“We had topics we wanted to cover, but we always made sure we gave the patients free rein over the conversation,” Cruz said.

The sessions give patients the opportunity to have their questions answered and feel that their concerns are heard. Data from the research project show that providing this type of forum helps increase vaccine confidence. Patients who attend the education group meetings are more likely to get a COVID-19 vaccine, and they are more likely to get their second dose on schedule.

“[The patients] also left notes in the program evaluation thanking us for answering their questions in this way and telling us that the program was really great,” Cruz recalled. “We know how stigmatizing mental illness can be—maybe more so for minorities. It can be really hard to be heard and build trusting relationships.”

Cruz believes that one key to the program’s success is that the patient education group physically meets in the target population’s community. Lessons learned from this project, she says, apply to any underserved group, whether it’s immigrants, racial minorities, or people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Patients want to be heard. They need a safe space to ask questions and voice concerns. And those spaces work best in patients’ own communities.

“It’s really important in general that when we provide services, we do our best to go directly to a community and not just build resources for when a community comes to us,” she said.

Cruz chooses to participate in the research project because of her passion for working with underserved populations, including people experiencing homelessness, racial minorities, and immigrants.

As the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and a Dominican American father, Cruz said, “I have always seen the disconnect that happens in health care for populations who don’t look like your ‘standard’ American.”

As for pharmacists interested in addressing “the last-mile problem” in the push to get COVID-19 vaccines to the remaining holdouts, Cruz encourages pharmacists to find the underserved populations and go to them where they are, whether it’s a Spanish-language mass or a homeless shelter.

“When communities see you come to them because you want to help, I think that makes them more receptive and open, and that’s the first step,” Cruz said.

—Sonya Collins
February 2022

Community Outreach Tools to help increase COVID-19 vaccine confidence and Answer Common Questions about COVID-19 vaccines can be found at APhA’s Vaccine Confident microsite.