OAHHS Hospital Voice Spring/Summer 2021

13 Spring/Summer 2021 came together with a greater good in mind. “I think what led it to be a really huge success goes back to the very first day at the Oregon Conven- tion Center,” said William Olson, chief operating officer for Provi- dence. “We brought 100 or so peo- ple in to begin mapping out what a mass vaccination site would look like. We said, ‘Leave your badge at the door. Everybody is here for a single goal—to get shots into arms.’ That set the tone from the very beginning. It was tremen- dous to watch and see everyone work together to get this done for the community.” Uncharted Waters Long before the first doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines came to Oregon, the foundation of what would become the All4Oregon vaccination site was already in the works. In the earli- est days of COVID-19, the chief medical officers from each of the health systems began meeting twice a week to see how the pan- demic was playing out. They shared information and compared response plans as a way to inform and assist each other. In April 2020, soon after Oregon got its first COVID-19 case, the COOs of the four health systems began to have their own weekly meetings for similar reasons. The topic of vaccination came up early on, but many thought a vaccine was still years away. Even so, the group began discussing what it would look like for all four health systems to come together around a large vaccination effort. Then in late 2020, the vaccine became available. The Oregon Health Authority sent doses to hospitals and health systems, who were directed to vaccinate their staffs, keeping those frontline workers safe so they could then inoculate the rest of us. Once that was tended to, the four systems in the Portland area turned to the Oregon Health Authority to see what the plan was. What they learned was that there wasn’t really a plan in place. “I think there probably just was no one who really knew how big this was going to be,” said Wendy Wat- son, COO at Kaiser Permanente. “There was the whole scale of it, combined with the complexities of the vaccines, which all made it very challenging. We just thought, continues  “We just thought, let’s band together and do this, because we need to vaccinate everyone in the community as rapidly as possible. We all knew if we did it independently it would take too long.” Wendy Watson, COO at Kaiser Permanente