By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
During the COVID pandemic, the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization (MMPNO) — a local, Black professional nurses’ organization that has been serving the Seattle area since 1949 — made unprecedented strides in providing guidance and professional help in educating the public about COVID vaccines and in the administering of the vaccines in Seattle.
Since vaccines have become available, MMPNO and its members have partnered with the City of Seattle and other community partners to administer over 8,000 vaccinations. Some of those partners include the Seattle Fire Department, the Center for Multicultural Health, Dunai Health Clinic, and the Southeast Seattle Senior Center.
Even with limited resources MMPNO did the work to help ensure the health and safety of the most vulnerable in our community.
“On a limited scale we did a couple of clinics and served over 200 almost 300 people for first doses and we did that in the Central Area in collaboration with the Dunia Health Clinic,” says MMPNO President Joycelyn Thomas, a family nurse practitioner and medical director for Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Federal Way. “The Dunia Clinic provided the vaccines and MMPNO provided the nurses to administer the vaccines. That was very successful.”
According to Frankie Manning, MMPNO’s Director of Outreach, the organization wanted to make sure that people not only had convenient access to vaccination and booster shots, but that they also had health care professionals that they could identify with to answer questions and concerns.
“Part of what our role is as an organization is to reach out into our community and to meet the needs of our people,” says Manning. “So, they can feel comfortable asking the questions and getting answers that are important to them.”
“What was important about this work is when people walked in they saw people that looked like them and the whole idea that they could talk to people and ask questions and that they would be given an answer that was important to them,” added Manning.
Partnering with the city and the fire department, MMPNO was able to expand their impact in the fight against COVID, as this partnership produced a significant number of people getting vaccinated and boostered.
“[This was] our largest endeavor, which was very exciting,” says Thomas, who says that the organization was happy to answer the call of city officials to help administer booster shots.
Even after the initial rush of COVID variants over the winter, and the number of people seeking vaccinations began to decline, MMPNO continued their work on a more personal basis for populations that were hard to reach.
“In the beginning around December, every Tuesday and Thursday, MMPNO were doing anywhere between 500 and 700 vaccines at a time, at each clinic,” says Thomas
“Through that same collaborative with Dunia we were able to still continue providing vaccines but on a smaller scale,” says Thomas. “More like door-to-door to populations that are hard to reach for example people that are homebound, senior homes, etc. We have been doing that on an as-needed basis with anywhere from 12 to 25 people.”
According to Thomas, the sight for the majority of their work was held at the Southeast Seattle Senior Center in Rainier Valley. As nurses answered the call helping communities of color get access to vaccines.
“We answered the call, and met the need to help getting boosters in BIPOC communities,” says Thomas. “We were primarily trying to get vaccines in arms and so we helped with that effort. But as the need for the booster waned, so did the need for us to do that work.”
According to Thomas, the marketing campaigns executed by the City of Seattle, along with MMPNO’s community networking, were invaluable in getting the word out and helped the organization reach their milestone of administering over 8,000 vaccinations since February of 2021.
Manning agrees and said it was important for the organization to be present and available at places that were easily accessible by people in Central and Southeast Seattle.
“Working with the city and the Southeast Senior Center our efforts there helped us to reach more people, and working two days a week we were able to reach up to 700 people a day,” said Manning.
Outreach turned into action is the most important aspect of MMPNO, as they do their best to serve the community and keep people healthy.
“We want to keep them healthy and the best way we can do that is to collaborate with the community and understand what their needs are,” says Manning. “Also, being able to share with us some of the significant problems that they may be having, and getting things done so that we are able to work with them in getting them the things that they need.”
