Hundreds of students are staying healthy this season thanks to the efforts of the Stanford Flu Crew, which expanded its offering of flu vaccination clinics in dining halls this year to include Stern Dining.

The program is made up of undergraduate coordinators and medical students who administer free and low-cost flu shots to students, faculty and staff at Stanford and others in the local community.

Every fall since the program began in 2001, the Flu Crew sets up shop in a number of locations that are student hubs, including campus dining halls. Lisa Ly ’15, an undergraduate coordinator for the Flu Crew, stressed the importance of convenience.

“I guess you could get [your shot] at Vaden, but their times are a little more limited,” Ly said. “We’re going to the dining halls, so most of the time [students] are already going there to eat.”

Stern Dining was a major addition to the clinic locations this year with 229 vaccinations administered there, beating out two other returning locations.

Meelim Lee ‘16, another Flu Crew coordinator, explained that the locations come down to scheduling and that the group will continue to expand.

“We definitely try to have a vaccination clinic at all the undergraduate dorms, especially the freshman dorms,” Lee said. “I guess this year we were just lucky to be able to work out a day with [Stern Dining].”

“In the future we definitely want to vaccinate at all the dining halls, so Stern is definitely one that we’ll try to include in the upcoming years,” she added.

Part of the Flu Crew’s mission is to help vaccinate communities outside of Stanford as well. To that end, they often hold events at churches, homeless shelters and other venues, such as the Monterey Mushroom Farm. According to Yu-Jin Lee ‘11 M.D. ‘17, a medical student director of the Flu Crew, the program’s vaccination efforts now reach as many people outside of the Stanford community as Stanford affiliates.

Surya Nagaraja M.D. Ph.D. ‘17, another medical student director of the Flu Crew, reported positive responses to this volunteer work in the local community.

“We had an event last week where we went to a church in Santa Clara County to vaccinate families and children,” Nagaraja said. “There were four masses throughout the day. We took 500 vaccines and we used them all up in the first two masses.”

Events at locations like the CityTeam homeless shelter in San Jose have the potential to save lives, according to Nagaraja.

“You can have impact on an entire community,” Nagaraja said. “By doing this you can significantly reduce the occurrence of flu in these communities that are in high contact with each other. You’re reducing the mortality rate and serious illness in children and elderly people.”

Flu Crew volunteers take a number of precautions before administering the shot to anyone. This is especially important in the events off campus, where residents might not have experience with vaccination.

“Because a lot of the local community members we go to [are] in the underserved community, a lot of them are wary of vaccinations and flu shots in general,” Yu-Jin Lee said. “So we do a lot of education of what it means to get the vaccine, how it works and why they should get it.”

The group wants to continue expanding the educational aspect of the program in future years.

“Our ideal goal would be to educate people one on one when we vaccinate them,” Nagaraja said. “It’s quite a process to be able to disseminate information like that, so we haven’t been able to do it this year. Hopefully we can get to it next year.”

The program has a goal of administering 6,000 vaccinations this year, which is 2,000 more than were given last year. They have not yet tallied the total number of vaccinations administered because vaccination events are still occurring.

Contact Josie Hodson at jhodson ‘at’ stanford.edu.