Federally Qualified Health Centers, or FQHCs, have been a linchpin of the federal plan to promote vaccine equity nationwide. But efforts to get vaccines to minority communities have lagged behind.
Kasturi Pananjadi is a data reporter for the Connecticut Mirror. She reports that state health centers have fallen short of their vaccination goals.
“I think that the reason why the FQHCs are so interesting is because they’re also part of this national strategy to address this problem nationwide. And, though it’s really hard to compare one FQHC to the other, because the eligibility requirements have been so different to this point, it is still a valuable question to ask yourself, is this working?” Pananjadi said.
Panajadi said that statewide, data could paint a misleading picture of individual health centers as they try to serve their local community. She points to FQHCs in the New Haven neighborhood of Fair Haven and in Norwalk that used different tactics to get people vaccine shots.
“I was really interested in Fair Haven talking about attempts to literally knock on every door that they could find to bring into the vaccine administration program. Norwalk’s attempts to physically sit down and call every single patient on their roster. How they spent days on the phone with people talking about their concerns and telling people there was a dedicated vaccine for them, if they wanted one,” Panajadi said.
You can read the full story on vaccine distribution at ctmirror.org.