OAHHS Hospital Voice Spring/Summer 2021

9 Spring/Summer 2021 Several cavernous buildings on the 185 acres of the Oregon State Fair & Expo Center were among a half-dozen addresses that pinged on the Salem Health radar as potential vaccination hubs. The short list included the Salem Air- port Terminal, the vacant 103,000-square-foot JCPenney store in downtown Salem, the Salem Armory, the Oregon Mili- tary Department, and the Lan- caster Mall. All had abundant parking acreage in common, a plus, but there were many other fea- tures—and logistics—to consider. This is why, as dusk fell on a December afternoon a few days before New Year’s, Jim Bauer, Salem Health’s chief development officer, was at the gatehouse of the Oregon Military Department, at 1776 Militia Way SE. He was showing his Salem Health ID to a skeptical guard as he explained why he needed to get inside the compound, drive his white Honda CR-V around and check out the parking lots, stop a couple of times to scope things out, have a looksee inside the biggest build- ing, and maybe take some pic- tures and video, as he’d been doing around other locations to gather relevant information for the site selection process. “This poor guy didn’t know what to do,” Bauer recalled, chuckling sympathetically. “So, he had to call it up the food chain.” At moments like that, it helped that Bauer, in his newfound role as location scout, had the kind of community ties that came from his years on the board of the Salem Area Chamber of Com- merce, among other civic activi- ties. He and the guard soon discovered they had a colleague in common, and Bauer proceeded to fill out some forms about the pur- pose of his visit—and also handed over his driver’s license, to be retrieved when he left. The late-afternoon visit was one of a flurry of such reconnaissance missions, with Bauer often returning to the same site at dif- ferent times of day, to observe traffic patterns and other variable conditions. The result was a list of the potential sites and a corre- sponding matrix that looked like a gymnastics score card, with points assigned from 1 to 10 for about a dozen elements—like traffic flow, proximity to mass transit, accessibility to a diverse population, impacts on the sur- rounding neighborhoods, and the ease with which operations might be scaled up or down, as needed, for up to six months, and possibly longer. Scarcely a week after Bauer was at the Military Department gate- house, the points on the scoring matrix were added up and the site list whittled down. On Sunday, January 3, with new COVID cases spiking, Nester Wolfe asked: “So, which one can we have tomorrow?” “We can get the fairgrounds tomorrow,” Bauer responded, hav- ing received assurances from Mar- ion County Commissioner Kevin Cameron, who is also chair of the fairgrounds board, that he would be able to work with Salem Health to transform the fairgrounds into a vaccination hub. “As soon as we knew what the loca- tion was, our entire Incident Com- mand team got in the car and went to the fairgrounds so we could get eyes on the location,” Franke said, referring to the on-call Salem Health teams that respond to unforeseen incidents posing a risk to community health—like wild- fires or pandemics. Then, Franke said, it was a matter of “looking at the location, deter- mining how we would set it up for the traffic flow in the parking lot, to walking into the building, to registering the patient, to vacci- nating the patient, to having the patient sit and monitoring him.” In other words, logistics. The site was readied for a trial launch on January 6, when 167 healthcare providers and clini- cians from the area, among the first deemed eligible for vaccina- tion, got their shots. The next day, Franke said, when the site opened to anyone eligible for vaccination, more than 1,700 inoculations were given. Four days later, the total number of shots surpassed 8,000. continues 