April 14, 2021 –
As more and more people in the community are vaccinated, a majority of calls FHN team members place to people on its waiting list to schedule appointments go unanswered or the appointments are unneeded due to people being vaccinated elsewhere, needing to postpone their appointment, or for other reasons. Making hundreds of calls is not only time-consuming, but also slows down the process of getting to people who are waiting to be vaccinated. Therefore, FHN is transitioning to a self-scheduling process for vaccination appointments.
The first self-scheduling COVID-19 vaccination event is Saturday, April 17, for which anyone over the age of 18 may directly register themselves for an appointment slot. The vaccine at this event will be Moderna, a two-dose vaccine which has only received emergency use authorization in people over 18, so participants must be available for a second shot in 28 days. (Future events that utilize the Pfizer vaccine will be open for anyone over 16 as it has received emergency use authorization for those 16 and 17 as well as older individuals; this will be noted in the registration for those events.) As always, there is a defined supply of vaccine and the number of appointments available is based on that quantity. The same will be true of similar events in the future.
“If you are currently on the FHN waiting list and have not yet been called for an appointment, please feel free to register yourself for this event at www.fhn.org/vaccination," said FHN Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Kathy Martinez, MSN, RN, FACHE. “We will announce future vaccination events on our website (www.fhn.org), our Facebook page, and through traditional media when possible.”
“We want to be sure that we are vaccinating all eligible people as quickly as possible while providing flexibility for appointments,” Martinez said. “We will continue to call names on the waiting list through Friday, April 23, but we also encourage everyone to keep checking back and self-schedule an appointment as soon as they can.”