No news is...well, no news, really

Liked the 8pm applause for health service workers.  Took part in our own street here in Leith and there were plenty neighbours participating. Good to hear.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

So long and thanks for all the fish

  Well that's a bit odd. I think I may have completed my last shift as a vaccinator at the weekend there... I finally managed to get some movement on joining the staff bank. Following some excellent advice from wiser colleagues I made direct email contact with some NHS Lothian high heid yins and lo and behold it worked. I should be part of the staff bank before the end of the month. It's a shame it took so long and required such escalation but hey ho, that's sometimes how it needs to go. So, why have I finished so abruptly? Well, I am on annual leave for the next two weeks, my contract ends at the end of March, hopefully smoothly eliding into a bank contract and I have 24hrs of annual leave remaining...which pretty much covers the remainder of March. So...that's it. I'm done. At least for the time being. My last couple of shifts over the weekend were fairly quiet and uneventful. I met two former colleagues from health who I worked with in East Lothian a good few...
Read more

A ragtag rabble of reprobate retirees, QMU about to close down, 60 a day and Pfizer too.

The end of QMU is in sight. This is the final week of the drive through service at QMU. Over the course of the last few weeks the daily numbers have been between 500 and 800 and we have started to vaccinate with Pfizer alongside AstraZenica. Our staff have often been called to other short-staffed centres in the Lothians, including myself spending a shift at the Lowlands Centre at Ingliston. Over the last few weeks I have hit a personal daily best of 60 vaccines administered in an 8 hour shift and vaccinated a client who stated that they had never had an injection that had not caused them to faint. This client, on seeing my eyes drift down to their considerable array of arm tattoos were quick to point out the irony themselves and claimed, perhaps rightly, that tattoo needles were very different. However a challenge had now been set. Could I vaccinate this client without them keeling over in a dead faint? Well I would certainly have go. Their request was for the left arm so ...
Read more

Omicron, boosters and ramping up the pace for Xmas

December started off on a wee bit of a lull, perhaps a calm before the storm. At Leith CTC the numbers attending were beginning to fall as we focused on 1 st and 2 nd jabs as well as some boosters. It began to pick up once we added flu jabs to the list of vaccines administered. And then along came the little known fifteenth letter of the Greek alphabet to spice things up somewhat. Once Omicron emerged as a significantly infectious and then also highly transmissible variant the pace and demand accelerated. We do not yet know how virulent this variant is and won’t know that sadly until enough people are infected and enough time has passed. It may well be into the new year before there is any clarity on this. In the meantime our main lines of defence are increased social distancing measures, albeit variable across the UK, and a major push to get as much of the population vaccinated and especially boosted as possible. This has meant cutting back on flu vaccinations and some enormous...
Read more