Back to Practice with Covid-19

A couple of 8 hour shifts this week before a period of nine days off. Mostly unremarkable shifts with a mix of vaccine delivery, supervision of new starts and occasional oversight of reconstitution cabin. However we also had a rather mighty wind… The second of my shifts was on windy Tuesday. It was fine enough when I arrived in the late morning but the wind speeds quickly picked up and did cause some anxiety as well as some problems. I was informed that the structures were designed to withstand wind speeds of 60mph. However the forecast was for a wind speed of 55mph with gusts considerably higher. Various parts of our secure marquees began to work loose and teams of staff from the marquee providers soon arrived to tie, repair and lash things down as much a possible. One avenue was out of action for most of the shift because of loose dangling light fittings. The main issue for vaccinators were the doors to the cabins which could be rather hard to hold onto in gusts and the risk of va...

  Second week completed with one early shift and my first ever 12 hour shift. In the whole of the 12 hour shift I only got through two vials as a vaccinator! The first third of my shift was spent supervising a new colleague with her first shift. The middle four hours was spent in the reconstitution cabin, a necessary but somewhat dull roll ruling over the cold chain with 31 vials reconstituted! And then for the final four hours I was the runner for rest of evening. This role is basically the link between the reconstitution cabin, the vaccinators and the car management team. It’s important that we don’t take out too many vials especially as the day draws to a close in order to minimise any possible vaccine wastage. So the task is to liaise with everybody about the number of cars waiting (and the number of people in them due for a vaccine), the number of vaccine doses that each vacci na tor has left, and to ensure that these match up by the close of the day. M y separate early ...

I have now completed my first 16hr week of Vaccinator shifts at the QMU Drive-Through centre and it has been interesting, informative and fun. My first 4hr shift on Friday evening paired me with an experienced vaccinator (ie someone who had started the previous day!). My new colleague, a retired GP, was very good company and a good practitioner of SODOTO (See One, Do One, Teach One). I was very quickly vaccinating alongside my colleague and duly signed off as competent. The main additional skill besides vaccine administration is learning the dark art of preparing the highly delicate Pfizer vaccine and maintaining the cold chain system while taking care with expiry timings of each vial so that not a drop of this precious stuff is wasted. The following day, over an 8hour shift, I was paired with with a new vaccinator colleague, a physiotherapist, and used the same SOTODO technique to help him to get up to speed as a competent practitioner in his ow...

It took a number of emails over the course of last week to finally get access today to the NHS Lothian QMU Vaccinator e-Roster and find myself with shifts allocated over this coming weekend. I am due to work various shifts totalling 16 hours over this weekend. I also have shifts allocated for the rest of February. So it’s gathering pace. Vaccinations will soon be taking place at four large centres across Lothian as well as a number of smaller local clinics here and there. As mentioned before the QMU site is a drive-through location so I am intrigued as to how that will all be set up and organised. My guess is it will be the coldest and windiest vaccination centre in Lothian. So long as we can wrap up reasonably it should be fine. I’m looking forward to my first series of shifts and will let readers know a little more about it after my first set of shifts are completed.