Still in a lull

Worked early and mid shifts on Wednesday and mid and late on Thursday this week. Wednesday was my first shift as acting Clinical Lead for the site.

Challenge number one. Find the keys to open up. I knew where they should be kept but I was also aware that this location has already changed a few times...but hopefully not since I was last on.

Challenge number two. Allocate available staff to vaccination booths and other tasks. This looked simple enough for the first four hours as there were only a few staff on. A few more started at 11:30 that also needed allocating.

Thereafter I was really just a glorified gopher/runner weighed down by keys, mobile phones, responsibilities and a walkie talkie. I was basically there to answer practical, procedural or clinical queries and resolve or work around any issues that might arise.

The first issue that did arise was an IT failure that took down our system for registering clients and recording vaccinations. There was a wee bit of a scramble to ensure we had enough of the correct paper forms to record vaccine clients manually. Fortunately the IT system was restored after about an hour so there were only a few paper records to log into the system later.

Otherwise the shift was pretty uneventfully quiet. We had only three out of a possible twelve cabins operational and even then there were still some large gaps between clients. The grapevine suggests that we will be full on busy next week but we will need to wait and see if that turns out to be true.

For my second day this week I was a vaccinator for the first four hours and acting clinical lead for the second four hours with responsibility for shutting up shop at the end for the day.

The experience so far has been very positive. The site is full of good, friendly, experienced, supportive and helpful clinical, admin, first aid and traffic management staff. The clinical staff come from a diverse range of nursing, midwifery, medical, dental and allied health professional backgrounds with some adding extra hours to their day jobs and many others returning from retirement to make sure this vaccine roll out goes as safely and as effectively as it can. The admin, site and first aid staff all seem really keen to work together collaboratively to make sure everything works as smoothly as possible.

Looking forward to next week when, with a wee bit luck and enough vaccines, we may have twelve cabins running each day and get through some 8 or 9 hundred clients daily.




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