1. Welcome to Beyond the Needle
A Physician’s Guide to Increasing COVID-19 Vaccination Rates
Episode Description
Mustafa Alavi, MD and Marian Sassetti, MD, FAAFP introduce the podcast series and explain, in their own words, the goals and hopes for the series.
They will look back and honor our struggles and traumas that got us to this point and pause to acknowledge how much we have accomplished in such a short time. They will share the highs and lows of their experiences and lessons learned throughout the pandemic, as well as stories of support and encouragement.
Research has shown that the number of primary care physicians per capita was independently associated with higher COVID-19 vaccination rates. Patients come to their physician as a trusted source. Primary Care Clinicians are the single greatest weapon in fighting this pandemic.
Our goal for you, our listeners, is empower you to get your patients vaccinated whether it’s at your site or somewhere else in your community and to make every clinic in Illinois successful in implementing vaccinating against COVID-19 within their own clinical encounters. There are still several barriers to doing this within many of our colleagues’ practices, so over the course of the next few podcasts we hope to tackle those barriers and give helpful hints and solutions to any clinicians hoping to vaccinate within their own practice.
Learning Objectives:
- Recognize how we, our patients, and communities have been impacted & what we have accomplished since March 2020 – the evolution of where we came from to where we are now
- Describe the pivotal role primary care clinicians have in overcoming this pandemic
- Restate topics that will be covered to offer support and guidance to practices that:
- Haven’t started to offer the COVID-19 vaccines and the importance of doing so
- Increase the vaccination rates among practices that are offering the vaccines
