The Yavapai County Board of Supervisors voted to allocate over $275,000 to Spectrum Healthcare for their work in providing COVID-19 vaccinations at a special meeting June 9.
The board allocated a total of $400,000 of the county’s American Rescue Plan Act funds to both Spectrum and Yavapai Regional Medical Center in Prescott to help reimburse the costs of vaccinating the public, which Leslie Horton, public health director of Yavapai County community health services, said cost the clinic about $16 per shot.
“I believe that it’s an exceptional use of these funds to show the support of all that they’ve done, not just at those two POD [point of dispensing] sites, but also in their deployment across our county to get our rural county vaccinated,” Horton said. “It’s an opportunity for us as a county to say thank you so much for all the work that was done.”
Spectrum Healthcare administered 84,700 of the 171,000 total vaccines given at POD sites in Yavapai County, with the Cottonwood clinic administering 32,000, Camp Verde giving 658 and 6,077 being administered at mobile units in rural areas. While the POD sites are no longer active, Spectrum is still offering COVID-19 vaccines at its clinic and has administered around 619 total there
“In that small geographic area, that’s a huge number of vaccines that they were able to deploy,” Horton said.
Yavapai County Supervisor Craig Brown applauded Spectrum’s work in bringing its mobile units to rural communities such as Seligman, Ashfork and Congress.
“They were out there moving before we ever set up the PODs,” he said.
The POD sites were set up within a week of the county receiving vaccines. Horton said the process of setting up medical facilities in entirely unequipped areas and distributing such a “fragile vaccine” to so many people in such a short time was a costly and difficult process.
“It was an intensive amount of work,” she said. “We were very blessed to have YC Medical Center and Spectrum step up and say, ‘We want to do it. We’re going to do it without funding, we’re going to do this because it’s what the community needs to get rolling again. … They truly did this out of the kindness of their hearts without funding, without any knowledge that this fund could come our way and possibly reimburse these costs.”
Sunshine Dean, the vice president of business development at Spectrum Healthcare, said the donation will have a large impact on the organization and it is thankful for the county’s support.
“The generous grant funding from the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors will have a tremendous impact for Spectrum Healthcare. We are extremely thankful for the support from Yavapai Board of Supervisors throughout this pandemic, and ongoing,” she said.
Dean said operating the two large POD sites they set up did come at an expense to Spectrum, which it was able to cover on its own during the startup. Expenses included staffing, which included many of its own staff as well as over 1,400 volunteers, coordinating with venues, purchasing supplies, buying electronic equipment and developing training manuals. It also brought the vaccine to rural communities and directly to homebound residents in the county. The funding from the county will help to reimburse the associated expenses.
“The last year has looked different for all of us, and Spectrum wanted to be part of the solution,” Dean said. “We saw that COVID-19 vaccine distribution was the path to returning to a healthy, strong community. … Our goal is always the well-being of our community.”
This is not the first grant that Spectrum Healthcare has received for its efforts. In March, it received a total of $70,000 to help support the volunteers administering the shots by providing them with free lunches. A total of $50,000 was donated by the city of Cottonwood, the Margaret T. Morris Foundation donated $10,000, and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Prescott donated $10,000.
