In an effort to prevent COVID-19 vaccine doses from going to waste, some Arizona clinics have implemented a vaccination on-call waitlist. These clinics call people on their waitlists and once a person receives a call, they have an hour to get to the site. 

Dr. April Corona is the chief medical officer of North Country HealthCare in northern Arizona. She says they developed the waitlist system when they were vaccinating their own staff. 

“We had started to realize that if we were not going to waste doses which we strongly believe that this is a limited resource that’s going to get us through this pandemic, in other words going to end the pandemic, so we know how precious it is that we don’t want to have a wasted dose,” Corona said. 

Corona said that having a waitlist system has made the vaccination process run smoothly.  

“What we developed was a system where we could create a schedule and we generally schedule 10 at a time still, and then we have every single day for every single clinic at all of our different sites, we have an on-call list, " Corona said. "And that on-call list doesn’t get filled until the day before.”

Corona said when they make the waitlist the day before, they call each person to confirm that they can be there on time to receive the vaccine before it expires.

According to Corona, since they started the waitlist, they have not wasted a single dose. 

North Country Healthcare is accepting vaccination appointments for residents of Apache, Coconino, Gila, Mohave, Navajo and Yavapai counties. Registration information can be found at https://northcountryhealthcare.org/covidvaccine1b/.

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