Welcome to Health Connection—Island Hospital’s first email newsletter! Our goal with Health Connection is truly what the name implies. We hope to bring our patients timely information on our services, classes and events. We still plan to publish Heartbeats, our printed magazine, a few times each year, but in today’s fast-paced world, it’s important that we find more ways to connect. This is a vehicle to keep you more informed (and quickly). If ever there was a time to increase communication and connection, it’s during the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination roll-out. We’d love to hear from you on what you found helpful in this newsletter and what you’d like to see more of moving forward. You can reach us at marketing@islandhospital.org. We hope you find this first installment of Health Connection informative, and we look forward to connecting with you again soon!

Before COVID-19 vaccine information hit the news cycle late last year, our team was already getting up to speed on the State of Washington’s distribution plans. This work included applying for approval to become a vaccination distributor, collaborating with other Washington State hospitals to share insights, reviewing state requirements, developing strategies and forming teams to stand up a clinic. This has been an all-hands-on-deck effort; a lesson in flexibility, adaptability and resilience. We pulled staff from nearly every department in the hospital and reached out to our amazing volunteer network, both new and old. We’ve had a great response from community members who want to help with the effort and we are developing plans and processes to on-board new volunteers specifically for the vaccination clinic.