NACCHO’s School-Located Vaccination Clinic Toolkit

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Vaccines are key in preventing the spread of disease and serious illnesses, protecting populations like young children, individuals with compromised immune systems and other vulnerable populations. Several approaches, including school-located vaccination clinics (SLVC) programs are effective in ensuring adequate vaccination coverage among this expanded population.

School-located vaccination clinics (SLVC) is one approach to increasing community health while promoting routine vaccinations uptake. To best support local health departments (LHDs), schools (K-12 education), and other public health stakeholders, NACCHO has created this School-Located Vaccination Clinic (SLVC) toolkit that is a repository of information and resources to assist in facilitating immunization community outreach in the grade-school settings.

LHDs lead the efforts for organizing and implementing these programs. NACCHO supports these efforts and seeks to continue to engage and learn how to best assist LHDs, and ways to best support programs like these to effect change in local communities.

Visit CDC's Back to School with Routine Vaccines page for more information about national initiatives to increase vaccination coverage rates in schools.

Overview

SLVC programs assist communities vaccination uptake by utilizing schools as trusted messengers. Facilitating SLVC allows local health department to tap into the large audience of students, parents and guardians, faculty, administrators, and operational staff. This population of individuals have the common interest of safeguarding children. School in many cases have available space with adequate resource to support efforts to facilitate a clinic. Partnering with schools can have a lasting effect on communities. SLVC allows communities to immunize individuals of all age groups in a short timeframe.

Private medical sectors, as well as public health clinics have limited capacity and often are unable to vaccinate the expanded population as effectively as the SLVC programs. A few advantages of school-located vaccination clinics are:

  • Increased number of vaccinated children
  • Improved efficiency and cost-saving from a public health perspective
  • Increased access to students who are from minority groups, are economically disadvantaged and/or are from families whose primary language is not English
  • Reduced absenteeism, for both vaccinated and unvaccinated students
  • Reduced absenteeism for staff and teachers

The School-Located Vaccination Clinic Toolkit is a collection of resources that contain information regarding best practices and tools to conduct school-located vaccination (SLVC) clinics. The goal of the toolkit is to promote school-located vaccination clinics, highlight the resource of schools being trusted messenger, and the greater capacity of schools for vaccine confidence and messaging for all stakeholders involved including school administrators, parents, children, and adolescents alike.

The resources included in this toolkit are organized in chapters by topic area: Planning, Relationships & Communications, Educational Materials, Implementation, and Evaluation. These chapters can be used as a part of the toolkit as a whole, or independently as needed. Most of the items listed in the individual chapters contain linked resources and other information to be considered during each of the stages of school-located vaccination clinic planning, implementation, and evaluation.

LHDs can use this dynamic repository to build their own school-located vaccination programs, connect with colleagues, and share what works and what does not. The toolkit does not have all the answers, and as more programs are conducted, we anticipate that it will continue to expand.

This SLVC toolkit is a "living" document that includes background literature, consent forms, letters to parents, and assessment/evaluation tools that are easily adapted to school-located vaccination clinic programs. Additional resources can be added at any time. If you have resources that would benefit the SVLC toolkit, please e-mail [email protected].

The Toolkit

This section includes tools, information, and checklists necessary to plan a School-Located Vaccination Clinic including best practices, how to staff, fund, and supply!

Logistics—checklists and general information for successfully planning school-located vaccination clinics

Timeline—examples of timelines and checklists for planning SLVC clinics

Staying Informed—helpful resources for aspects to consider when planning your timeline

Funding and Budgeting—sample budgets and general funding information for SLVC clinics

Staffing—how to staff the clinic including utilizing volunteers

Interpretation Services—resources to support communication with diverse language populations

Training—useful information for administering vaccines

Supplies— how to select, store, and handle vaccines

Incident Management and Command—Overview of Incident Management System (IMS)/Incident Command System (ICS) and outlines of the various positions within the system.

Information, letters, and other communications necessary to build important relationships with those connected to school-located immunization clinics, including school staff, parents, and other potential partners.

Partner Overview

Tools for Teachers, Principals, and Students

Tools to Involve and Notify Parents and Parent Groups

Tools to Involve Providers

Tools to Involve Community Organizations

Flyers

Factsheets, FAQs, and information statements that may be used to educate parents, school groups, students, or other partners.

Information necessary for the day of implementation of school-located vaccination clinic

Logistics

Emergency Management

Information needed for steps to take after the completion of school-located vaccination clinic

Additional Resources

Additional Articles

Contact Us

Community Health Program

Amy Maxson

Senior Program Analyst, Immunization

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