COVID-19 Response | Center for Primary Care Research & Innovation

Our Initiatives

Primary Care COVID-19 Response

COVID-19 Vaccination Implementation Toolkits

Primary care is an important part of the national vaccination strategy. We are uniquely trusted by the communities we serve, and therefore able to overcome vaccine hesitancy and inequitable access to mass vaccination sites. We are also able to quickly scale up or down our vaccine clinics as needed and creatively reach pockets of people who are overlooked by other vaccination efforts.

We have two toolkits: (1) implementation of a community-based vaccine site in a health center/clinic building equipped to provide clinical care and 2) implementation of COVID-19 vaccination as part of routine clinical care in a busy practice. The guides include prompts for questions you may need to ask, examples of many types of documents that you may need (and information about where to find more documentation), and lessons-learned from our experience.

How the toolkits are organized

We start by covering the knowledge we found useful about the COVID-19 vaccines, evidence related to these vaccines, and federal, state and county information and resources about vaccination, including strategies for equity in vaccine distribution and reaching hard-to-reach populations. Then we provide information about standing up a vaccine clinic or vaccinating as part of routine care. We start with planning and start-up activities and then take you through the process step-by-step. Most of the chapters contain links to external websites for additional information as well as handouts, checklists and other material.

About the team

We developed this guide to share our team’s experience with COVID-19 vaccination. Our primary care rural health center (OHSU Family Health Center in Scappoose, Oregon) implemented a community-based, large scale vaccine clinic on evenings and weekends in January 2021-June 2021. Our OHSU Gabriel Park Family Health Center in Portland, Oregon, began vaccinating for COVID-19 as part of routine clinical care beginning in June 2021.

We would love to learn from and integrate your experiences with COVID-19 vaccination into these guides. Please send us an email to share your experiences.