Hello everyone,

I just want to take a few moments and thank everyone that participated in receiving their COVID-19 vaccines yesterday.  This was the first step in eradicating COVID-19 from St. Camillus and return to normal for our residents, families and each of us.   Thank you all for doing your part.   By the end of the day, Walgreens administered nearly 400 vaccines between 130 residents in Skilled Nursing, Assisted Living and Memory Care and approximately 260 staff, volunteers and contracted staff.  We had a 90% participation rate of staff that signed up for the vaccine and those that received it. That is awesome! I am very proud of each of you that took this seriously and received the vaccination to help protect everyone that lives and works at St. Camillus.  It was a true display of the compassionate and caring culture that we are so dedicated of providing at St. Camillus.  Great job everyone! 

I want to also recognize the team that coordinated all of the vaccine education and for those that coordinated the very smooth vaccine clinic yesterday that was administrated by Walgreens.  These individuals include but are not limited to: Kathy Fairbanks, Lisa Merian, Heidi Eggers, Krista Simko, Courtney Wilson, Julie Leveritt, Gesa Hegeman, Pam Loveless,Shannon Angell, the care teams in Assisted Living, Memory Care and Skilled Nursing, printing services, food services, environmental services, security, transportation services, Pastoral Care, the Walgreens team.  I also want to recognize and thank all of the many volunteers that assisted throughout the day to keep things running smoothly and organized, these include: those listed earlier and Silvia Gomez, Jon DeVries, Kassandra Landgraf, Lee Anne Young, Amy Tezak, Ann Ondrejicka, Sandy Calawerts, Fr Mathew Perumpil, Colleen Mas, Melissa Curran, Dave Sinkula, Steve Watson, Justin Munzel among others that I simply cannot recall.  (My apologies if I missed your name, yesterday was a busy day and mind is tired, it was not intentional.)

However successful yesterday was, our work is not over.   We still need to be tested twice per week and we must remain diligent in our infection control practices to stop the spread of COVID-19 at St. Camillus and in the community.  We also still must get nearly 600 additional residents, Jesuits, staff and volunteers vaccinated by our goal date of 3/31/2021 and we need to receive our vaccine boosters on February 9 and thereafter for those receiving their initial vaccine later.   So we must keep pushing forward.

In other good news, we did receive authorization earlier this week to begin to administer the vaccine ourselves through the Wisconsin Vaccinator Program.  We will begin training on that shortly and begin to have vaccine clinics in the near future.  Please stay tuned for more information as it relates to these clinics.

For those that still have questions about the vaccine, please see the educational video from our listening sessions in Relias, checkout our COVID-19 and vaccine resource page (https://www.stcam.com/covid-communication/coronavirus-communication) or please ask me or anyone from the Leadership team.

Once again, thank you for your dedication to our mission and for all of your efforts in keeping those we are called to serve safe. Once again if I missed your name, I do apologize.

Sincerely,

‍Kevin Schwab, Chief Executive Officer