Vaccination Marketing campaign at Nursing Houses Faces Obstacles and Confusion

CVS and Walgreens have created paper and digital informed consent forms that nursing homes can use. Approval must be given in advance; The pharmacies need to know how many doses of the vaccine that need to be kept very cold to bring.

There is significant confusion about consent in nursing homes, especially when it comes to representatives who are not physically at the nursing home and cannot come due to concerns about the spread of the virus. Will an email be enough? What about consent over the phone? Or do declarations of consent have to be signed either in paper form or electronically?

Mr Cox, the CVS manager, said the company gave nursing homes additional guidance on how to get consent this week. He said he expected that in most facilities, a staff member would simply need to obtain consent from a resident’s medical representative over the phone and then enter it on the person’s medical record. A nursing home worker can then sign the consent form on behalf of the resident, he said.

Even giving consent by telephone or electronically within a few days can prove to be time-consuming.

The staff at SavaSeniorCare, one of the largest nursing home chains in the country, don’t believe they can get consent from residents and staff until they get the forms from CVS. They hadn’t received it by Monday, said Annaliese Impink, an executive at SavaSeniorCare who coordinates the launch of the vaccine. (TJ Crawford, a CVS spokesman, said final papers should be in nursing homes by Wednesday.)

Meanwhile, Ms. Impink said, nursing home workers have called family members of residents who cannot make their own consent decisions to confirm contact information in order to quickly get in touch with vaccination approval.

Cissy Sanders, whose 71-year-old mother has neurodegenerative disease and lives in a nursing home in Austin, said she was feeling the pressure to make a quick decision about her mother’s vaccination.

The administrator of her mother’s nursing home emailed her on Monday, telling her the vaccination process was fast and the doses were likely to run out.

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