Rutgers vaccine clinic recruits student volunteers amid rise in demand for booster shots

Rutgers’ on-campus vaccine clinic at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy is recruiting student volunteers across all schools and majors to help with tasks such as scribing, registering patients and administering the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine to individuals.

The clinic has increased its needs and is seeking additional volunteers due to the demand for booster shots and the subsequent increased volume of appointments. 

Jack Hemphill, graduate student in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and project coordinator in the Office of Clinical Affairs at Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS), and Parth Shah, assistant point of dispensing manager at the clinic, said that student, staff and faculty volunteers at the clinic are comprised of members from the Rutgers VAX Corps at RBHS. 

“The mission of the VAX Corps — for both clinical and non-clinical students — is to leverage the unique structure of RBHS to offer students a truly interprofessional educational opportunity in an effort to help address the most pressing public health emergency of the last century,” Hemphill and Shah said.

They said that in addition to providing a service for the community, the clinic provides students pursuing health care and non-health care careers with a unique interdisciplinary opportunity where they can share personal experiences. 

Depending upon the needs of the clinic, the specific number of student volunteers changes on a weekly basis, Shah and Hemphill said. Volunteers are primarily gathered and assisted by VAX Corps organizers. Roles volunteers are given depend on whether the student is in a clinical program at Rutgers and their level in the program.

“Non-clinical students, or even clinical students who are not eligible to vaccinate just yet, may be assigned to roles that include assisting patients with completing consent forms, helping with registration, scribing, monitoring patients for side effects after receiving the vaccine, answering questions and providing additional resources,” they said.

Both non-clinical and clinical students have devoted more than 5,000 hours to the clinic, and this includes students that may be required to attend as part of their clinical rotations.

Samuel Yang, an Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy senior student, said he started volunteering with the clinic when it first opened in May 2021 and has since been going in weekly to assist. 

Yang said he initially heard about the volunteering opportunity through the experiential education office of the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy. He was interested in the potential of the opportunity to reinforce his clinical skills while serving both the Rutgers community and the surrounding area.

“I think it’s important that we as students, who are privileged to receive higher education in healthcare, find opportunities to apply what we learn for the good of others,” he said. “In this case, we are dispelling the fear and misconception surrounding vaccines by explaining their critical role in mitigating the spread of COVID-19, the drug approval process leading up to administration and even the mechanisms of how these drugs act in the body.” 

He also said that staying inside to quarantine gave him a sense of duty with which he wanted to play an active role in ending the pandemic. 

Yang said that every aspect of the clinic is carefully planned out in order to maximize professionalism and meet the highest expectations for patient safety.

The clinic uses the clinical examination rooms inside the pharmacy building, which are typically used for practice learning sessions for students. Yang said this has remained efficient despite having fewer student volunteers with the return of in-person instruction.

In terms of his role at the clinic, Yang said he was first given a non-clinical position as a navigator, where he greeted patients and directed them to appropriate areas within the clinic for registration and observation after patients received the vaccine. 

“Eventually, I began working in the rooms as a scribe, who charts the medical record of the vaccine administration and ensures that all necessary paperwork, such as the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) vaccine card, is given to the patient,” he said. “As the fall semester started, I began vaccinating patients with Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen (Pharmaceuticals) COVID-19 vaccines with professional counseling and care to ensure patients are well-informed and comfortable.” 

Yang also said that within the past few weeks, he started working to maintain safety and efficiency standards by working on inventory control processes with the clinic’s on-site pharmacist. 

He said he enjoyed meeting and learning from different people, as well as working with other students pursuing careers in pharmacy, nursing and medicine. 

“There’s never a dull moment at the clinic and always new people to talk to and learn from,” Yang said. “The learning opportunity given to students is centered around the goal of interprofessional education, a concept of training our healthcare providers to better understand the roles of other professions and their own in the context of a team environment.”

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article claimed the University's vaccine site was one of the first to pass the state board of pharmacy's evaluation.