Covid Vaccines Update

The past few months have seen us be part of the Covid Vaccination programme and to date, we have administered nearly 17,000 vaccines. We would like to extend our thanks to the volunteers and staff who have been giving up their weekends and spare time throughout the week to help us. It really would not have been possible without them.

We would like to take this opportunity to explain how the vaccine programme works and when you can expect a call for your vaccines.

We are given about 7-10 days’ notice as to when to expect delivery of the vaccines. It’s at this point we find out what type of vaccine (Pfizer or Astra Zeneca) we will be receiving when to expect it, which dose it is for (first or second) and importantly how many vaccines we are receiving.

We then have a flurry of activity to book as many patients as we can who are eligible for the vaccine (based on what cohort we have been given the authorisation to give the vaccine to) where we have been booking up to 900 appointments in one day.

As a result, we are unable to offer the usual amount of pre-bookable appointments as we need to make sure we can have staff ready to administer the vaccines.

As you may be aware, we have not been able to offer first doses to patients for just over a month. This has been due to the supply of vaccines being used for second doses. We are expecting supplies for the first doses to start being delivered to us again throughout May and we hope to be able to start inviting patients under 50 soon.

We wish we could give you more certainty as to when to expect an invite but sadly we can only plan as far ahead as the notifications we are given.

We would once again request that you do not contact the surgery with regards to when to expect your invite – we will ensure that we invite anyone who is eligible when we receive notification of delivery dates.