- Border towns for the most part, are not as well resourced.
And so there's a need for a lot of help in those areas.
And so they're relatively speaking, poor.
So you have to look at the social determinants of health,
education, employment, people that have jobs,
because our medical insurance is employer based.
And so if people don't have jobs,
they don't have access to care.
- Once public health can get into communities
and express how important this is,
then you run into a communication challenge
with trying to get people to buy into the idea,
how have you made that work?
- Well, you know, it depends on the type of relationship
that public health has with these communities,
especially the communities that are hard to reach,
communities that are communities of color,
low resource communities.
You have to have an ongoing relationship.
And so if the public health departments are not in tune
with the community, which for the most part,
if you speak to people on the border,
you talk to health department directors,
they're pretty well entrenched in their communities.
- We were in Santa Cruz County recently,
and the mayor of Nogales touts the 87% vaccination rate.
And there have been some very dark days there, as you know,
that number is good for Santa Cruz County,
but you looked at places like Yuma and Cochise County
and they're hovering around 50%, why the difference?
- Well, I think, you have to look at the population,
Santa Cruz County, just the city of Nogales,
is about approximately 20,000.
The rest of the county is about 60 in total.
So it's a smaller community and it's easier, I think,
to be able to reach a lot of these populations
within Santa Cruz County.
Yuma is a little more extensive,
it's a little more rural
because you've got the city of Yuma,
but then you've got these smaller communities
within the county, so it's a little bigger as well.
You also have San Luis Río Colorado,
and so a lot of people in Yuma, from Yuma,
work in Yuma, but live in San Luis,
and so there's this border activity daily.
And I don't know if you've been to,
trying to cross the border in San Luis Río Colorado,
but it's always a challenge.
- There are cross border vaccination efforts
that seem to be launched by both governments
trying to work together.
How has that been as far as reaching the community
and saying, we want to do this, we have the supplies,
but we need you to come to us?
- Right, I think that's been one of the successes,
I think of this effort,
that there is so much cooperation and collaboration,
but that's been true of Arizona Sonora for many years,
through the Arizona-Mexico commission.
And I sit on the health committee,
I'm the co-chair with Dr. Christ,
and we have our counterparts in Sonora.
So I think a lot of it has to do with the relationship.
And it's like everything, Lorraine,
it's all about relationships.
- At this point, how many individuals would you say
that the mobile units, the border efforts,
have resulted in vaccinations here in the state?
- Well, we're still vaccinating on the border.
And so just our unit, just our two units,
We have one here in Tucson
and the other is based in Phoenix,
but the Tucson one has been doing a lot of Southern Arizona,
working with Cochise County, for example, Santa Cruz County,
Yuma County, in a four hour period,
we can do up to 800 vaccines.
But we truly mobilize the health sciences,
we mobilize our students and our faculty,
to contribute to these efforts because,
well, it's especially important,
because this is an interprofessional opportunity.
Our business is not just research,
but we also educate the next generation
of health professionals, whether they're pharmacists,
medical doctors, public health, nursing.
And so we mobilize those students with their preceptors,
faculty, to help us through these vaccination events
that we conduct all over, well, all over the state,
but especially within the border counties.
You have to think about it,
the border counties are a little smaller,
their health departments are a little smaller.
And so it's important to help them in any way
that we can as a university, that's our job really.
- Okay, Dr. Cecilia Rosales, from the U of A
College of Public Health, thank you.
- Thank you.