Drive Thru Vaccination Sites: Planning, Design, and Operation

Advantages of Drive-Thru Vaccination Sites

Q-The supply of emergency authorized vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 is expected to surge in the next two months, definitely as the European Medicine Authority (EMA) is about to approve the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the middle of March. A big challenge for all EU 
governments is to ramp up vaccine injection capacity to have all adults vaccinated by the end of the summer; or at least, those adults that want to be vaccinated.

To this end, more mass vaccination sites need to be opened. While many types of sites are possible, one type is often overlooked in Europe: drive-thru sites. While they have disadvantages (for instance, you need a car or at least a driver to get to the site), they offer also a number of advantages, in particular a higher level of infection control and more comfortable waiting. In fact, there is evidence that in particular vulnerable people that would find it too risky to go to a walk-in vaccination site have no objection to go to a drive thru site.The planning, design, operation, and feasibility of a mass vaccination site requires the input from different areas of expertise, including health care (the storage, preparation, the injection of the vaccines), logistics (finding suitable sites, setting up the facilities, communication systems, IT systems), and, of course, operations experts.

As the operations expert, you are tasked with the development of a first informed design of the required operational system and an informed estimate of its performance, assuming that sufficient space, staff, and vaccines are available. In fact, all that is asked from you is to identify the (high-level) required steps in the entire vaccination process (between a car arriving at the site and leaving the site), the parameters and variables that impact the performance of the system, and a first high-level indication of the expected performance of the system. You are definitely not expected to develop a discrete-event simulation.

Much information is available on the Internet about the design and operation of vaccination sites. It is perfectly ok to search for, critically review and use this information, but please cite the sources you consulted or used. It is also likely that you may have to make some assumptions, and again this is entirely feasible. In fact, you may dedicate some words on the data you would need to have to develop a more accurate design and estimate of the system’s performance. After all, you are only asked to develop a first design of the operational system to be discussed in a kick-off meeting with experts from all other disciplines present.