Two LA County moms volunteer to help seniors schedule vaccination appointments
2 LA County moms volunteer to help seniors schedule vaccination appointments
Two local moms are helping elderly LA County residents lock in a vaccine appointment.
LOS ANGELES - Two moms in Los Angeles County decided to help seniors 65 and older who are struggling to navigate the websites to lock in a COVID-19 vaccination appointment.
Carrie Hoffman realized the difficulty navigating the various county websites when she was booking appointments for her parents.
RELATED: Where to get a COVID-19 vaccine in Los Angeles County
"My parents are seniors and they live in Riverside County and I was very concerned. They both have a lot of health issues and I was very concerned with getting them the vaccine. My parents are fairly tech-savvy so I couldn't even imagine my grandmother being able to do it," said Hoffman.
Hoffman wanted to help other seniors in her community with the process.
"I just felt like people needed help. I was like how do we get to these people that need help and also like deeply seeking equity in getting to people who really need help navigating this," said Hoffman.
Hoffman reached out to her mom's friends as well to work together on finding appointments for seniors.
"The power of mom groups is actually humongous and we're all posting available appointments. I feel like we're all just scrambling and trying to reach out and grab and help as many of them as possible," she said.
One of the moms who got involved was Melissa Gould McNeely.
"I was super inspired by my friend, Carrie [Hoffman]. There's a bunch of other moms in my mom group knocking on doors to try to figure out how to help people," she said.
McNeely spread the word in her community on Nextdoor.
"I just put the word out on my local message board through Nextdoor to say if anyone's having trouble getting appointments to contact me and see what I could do and the board just lit up right away. Mostly what it's really turned into is a place to connect the information to people so anybody who has information is posting it there," she said.
McNeely believes their volunteer work highlights the lack of understanding of the vaccination appointment websites and the failures of community leaders in communicating accurate information.
"I think this is in many ways a story about the failures about how this information has been communicated to people in the first place and it's really a shame so it's fallen on people to find that information by themselves," said McNeely.
McNeely said there have also been several complaints from seniors about the long wait at vaccination sites.
"When the first populations of people that are having the vaccine available to them are also the guinea pigs and also the people who can sit in the car for the least amount of time and understand how to navigate computers the least, it's really not ideal," she said.
The moms have been helping people in Riverside County, Highland Park, El Sereno and other nearby communities through Nextdoor.
"There's just a huge demographic of people that are all connected to this neighborhood so there's a lot of information to be shared from that too and it's really helpful," said McNeely.
Hoffman said a lot of seniors are fearful about the appointment process but want to get vaccinated.
"It's been a really hard year and a lot of people are struggling and a lot of people are alone. A lot of the seniors that I've spoken to know someone who's died from this and are really scared because they know one in 50 seniors is going to die from this," she said.
Hoffman believes more people in the community should help seniors with booking appointments.
"I feel very strongly about this. We've been in these bubbles now for a year so it does create sort of this myopic thinking about this like just me or just me and my immediate family and this is the opportunity to get back into the community," she said.
The two also warned about scammers during the pandemic, and are urging seniors to avoid giving out any personal information to strangers when booking vaccination appointments.
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