Providing Comprehensive, Equitable Care to our Community

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Published:
May 6, 2021
Dr. Stephanie Morgan

Meet Stephanie Morgan, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, Director of Practice Innovation, Professor of Clinical Nursing and Director of our Wellness Centers. Amid the pandemic, Dr. Morgan (PHD ’13) has overseen a smooth transition to telemedicine and telehealth for wellness clinics, co-led UT Health Austin’s on campus vaccination clinics and served as a faculty fellow for UT’s Interprofessional Education program. Dr. Morgan coordinated these programs to provide comprehensive care to our community.

Thanks to Dr. Morgan’s strong and effective leadership, our nurse-managed clinics remained open and on the front lines when other clinics closed allowing us to reach deeper into our community to expand support in the social and mental health care space. When the first COVID-19 vaccines were distributed to the University, the School of Nursing became a critical partner in the effort to provide vaccinations to our staff and community. Dr. Morgan co-led the COVID-19 vaccination clinic campaign for UT Health Austin that began mid-December 2020 and quickly scaled up to provide 2,500 vaccinations a day to our community. The 100,000th vaccination was administered this past April with vaccination projections reaching 145,000 by early May.

The herculean effort to provide vaccinations at this scale required a trusted interprofessional collaboration between schools and colleges across the UT Austin campus. UT Austin’s Interprofessional Education (IPE) is a program where students and faculty from Dell Medical School, the School of Nursing, the College of Pharmacy, and the Steve Hicks School of Social Work come together to learn how to work in interprofessional teams to provide more efficient and safer care. As a Health IPE Faculty Fellow, Dr. Morgan helped shape the curriculum for teaching team-based interprofessional and collaborative care. The IPE program provided a large volunteer base and the structure for UT Austin’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

In addition to our on-campus clinics, Dr. Morgan also helped to launch two mobile vaccination outreach programs in conjunction with our African American Mental Health and Wellness Program (AMEN) program and the UT Medical Reserve Corps (UTMRC). These mobile clinics, Vaccine No Waste (VaxNoW) and Vaccination Administration Mobile OperationS (VAMOS), aim to prevent vaccine waste and provide fair and equitable access to marginalized and hard-to-reach community members. Dr. Morgan and our volunteer faculty and students have been involved in creating and managing these vaccination programs from planning to execution. Under her leadership, the UT Austin School of Nursing continues to be the backbone of our on-campus and mobile clinics.

We honor Dr. Stephanie Morgan for stepping up to ensure that our community was provided with the best care that only Texas Nurses can provide. From our wellness clinics to on campus and mobile vaccination clinics, Dr. Morgan and her team have worked diligently to ensure that our community receives safe, efficient and equitable care.