Shot in the Arm: Denver Laundry Gets COVID Vaccines

Posted February 18, 2021 at 4:27 pm




It took a lot of calling, emailing and meetings, but for the Hospital Cooperative Laundry, Denver, an extensive outreach effort to local health officials has paid off. By the end of this month 200 of its plant employees will have completed a two-shot regimen of COVID-19 vaccinations.

Kurt Koenig, general manager for the plant that’s owned by area hospitals but managed by Foussard Montague Associates Inc., a TRSA member based in St. Paul, MN, advised other laundries that want to get their teams inoculated against the virus that they must work proactively and persistently to get the job done.

“Yes, make connections with your local health departments,” Koenig said. “If you’re in the healthcare sector of our industry, see if you can work with people in the hospitals. We reached out to supply chain and environmental services people, and Nursing and Administrative staff just to see if we could gain some connections there.”  The results of those efforts were that the majority of the linen distribution employees who work in the hospitals also were able to receive the vaccination series along with the healthcare providers.

The process in the plant began several months ago. Laundry managers reached out to Denver health officials and asked them to review the plant’s protocols for preventing transmission of the virus. Like many other commercial and institutional laundries across North America, this includes staff temperature checks at the beginning and end of each shift, social distancing in break rooms, mandatory mask use, the use of plastic partitions to separate staff feeding ironers, and more. The Health Department director that visited the plant early in the pandemic was impressed with the effort the laundry had made to curb transmission of the virus, Koenig said. Later, he assisted the laundry in getting in touch with the right people who could get them on the priority list to get their staff inoculated. “Early on we had a relationship with the Health Department,” he said. “Our contact there visited our plant. He walked away quite impressed with all the protocols that we follow and came to understand the nature of our work. He came away from here feeling pretty good about who we are and what we do for the hospitals that we serve. When we contacted him, he remembered us and provided the contacts that got us to where we are today.”

As far as leading day-to-day outreach efforts, Koenig credits his human resources staff, including HR Director Marcela Vecchio and especially Assistant Director Elizabeth Plant. “She coordinated this entire effort,” Koenig said of Plant. “She was the one that was diligent with emails and phone calls. She hit a home run for us with the Health Department. Through the last four weeks, she’s coordinated this whole effort with getting the caregivers in here.”

The way the process has worked in Denver, local health authorities decided to use the opportunity to inoculate laundry employees as a training exercise for firefighters, nurses and emergency medical technicians as well. That way, they could learn the protocols for administering the vaccine developed by Moderna Inc. Koenig said the laundry was happy to cooperate with local health and other officials, including representatives of the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Public Health & Environment for the city of Denver. Staff welcomed the visitors, while laundry operations continued. The laundry served as one of Denver’s first on-site clinics for COVID-19 vaccinations outside of a hospital or other healthcare setting, Koenig said. When the program kicked off on Jan. 19, the plant welcomed 23 people, including a range of healthcare and public safety professionals. “We just rolled out the welcome mat and opened the doors to everybody,” Koenig said. “We opened up our office area, and our conference room. We just set up a little clinic.” Laundry staff received an additional round of shots on Feb. 16. When healthcare officials determined that they had a few extra doses, members of the community, including people aged 70 or over, were invited in to receive the vaccine. A third and final visit to the plant is slated for Feb. 26.

Staff participated on a voluntary, sign-up basis for the two-shot program. So far, only a few employees have reported adverse reactions to the vaccine. No problems were reported during the 15-minute mandatory monitoring periods immediately after the shots were given. The few who did have reactions reported flu-like symptoms or nausea. “A couple of people did call in sick the following day,” Koenig said. “Most of us just had sore arms.”

Once the staff is fully inoculated, Koenig said the plan is to retain the safety protocols that are in place for now, working in consultation with local health officials. One possible near-term change could be to drop the staff temperature checks. Health department officials have told laundry staff that two weeks after all employees are vaccinated, they can consider making this change. “That’s not confirmed yet,” Koenig said. “I need to get with our primary contact at the Health Department, but that would be a nice step forward for us.”

124