Stanford Vax Crew: A Model for Agile, Community-Centered Vaccination Campaigns.

Stanford Vax Crew, one of the largest medical-student-led vaccination programs in the United States, serves as a case study of a successful community-university partnership that adapted its existing operations to enable COVID-19 vaccine distribution. It offers a model for agile, community-centered vaccination campaigns that harness diverse stakeholder strengths to promote vaccine access and uptake in underserved communities. This case study aims to outline the history and structure of the community-university partnership model developed through Stanford Vax Crew, describe key observations of factors that contributed to the scalability of the model, and provide experience-based recommendations for future community-university collaborations.

The Immokalee Community Health Coalition: Operationalizing Trust.

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected migrant farmworker communities in the United States in case rates and deaths. In rural Immokalee, Florida, human rights, health care, and social support organizations with different strengths joined together to form a coalition that provided health information, tests, vaccines, and social supports. This report offers practical advice on how similar coalitions can overcome barriers to care, improve outcomes, and overall increase trust in the health system.

Motivations and deterrents toward blood donation in Kampala, Uganda.

Severe malaria, hemorrhage during childbirth, sickle cell anemia, injury from road accidents, and other medical conditions that necessitate blood transfusions affect thousands of Ugandans every year. However, only 0.3-0.5% of the population donates blood, which is less than half of the proportion recommended by the World Health Organization to maintain a sufficient supply in blood banks and health facilities. In January 2018, Uganda faced crisis level blood shortages, increasing preventable deaths in the country as patients lacked access to life-saving transfusions. To understand the factors that impact a person's decision to give blood and to inform public health campaigns that seek to promote donation, researchers collaborated with Uganda Blood Transfusion Services (UBTS) and the Uganda Red Cross Society (URCS), the primary actors in blood donation in Uganda, to conduct 50 semi-structured in-depth interviews with blood donors and non-donors and 22 key informant interviews with UBTS and URCS staff members. Through qualitative data analysis using Dedoose software, this study identified several key motivations that promote donation, including altruism, civic duty, and opportunities for disease testing, as well as important deterrents, including fear of needles and blood and lack of awareness of or access to blood donation drives. Results have been shared with blood collection agencies to inform public health campaigns that seek to dispel fears and promote motivations toward donation to increase the blood supply and decrease preventable deaths in Uganda.