Back to Practice with Covid-19

My full registration with the Nursing & Midwifery Council has now been formally re-established. I am back on the full nursing register. Well I never expected that. I will now be able to stay on the register until Feb 2025. If intermittent vaccinations continue over that period I could even extend beyond that date for further three years but I think probably not! I need to relearn the habits of full retirement as I keep stumbling towards new possible job activities (see later for details!). Meanwhile I commenced at Ocean Terminal at the start of February and it has been mostly quite quiet. It is located in the shop unit formerly held by French Connection and still has some glossy model pictures on the walls. We see about 100 to 160 people per day, mostly drop-ins and mostly boosters, but as there are usually at least 4 or 5 vaccinators it is not particularly onerous. At this rate I will be happy to give it up at the of my contract at the end of Marc...

  Well my jinxed journey as a modern day Jonah through the vaccination centres of Edinburgh continues. QMU drive-through in Musselburgh was my first location which closed down last summer in early June. I was redeployed to the EICC in central Edinburgh which closed its doors in September, only to reopen them in haste in December to cope with booster demand! And now Leith CTC vaccine centre is also closing and I will be redeployed to Ocean Terminal (OT) next month . While I would like to think this may be my last move I note that online OT only appears to be open until the 6 th March and, as my contract comes to a close at the end of March, I may yet have one more centre to close and one more move to make. I have regularly joked with new colleagues that once I begin to work in a new location that they should prepare themselves for imminent closure and redeployment. This no longer has the power to amuse. My attempts to work additional hours via either my contract or via the ...

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...

Time for a new update… Vaccinations continue apace at Leith. The very busy clinics of a month or so ago are beginning to quieten down lately. I presume we will soon start to do boosters and flu jabs by appointment before too long as drop-in first and second jabs appear to reducing in number as is only to be expected. Now for two of my favourite recent vaccine hesitant clients. First up is Spoon Man closely followed by Sweary Fitba Fan. Spoon Man came in for his second vaccination. After receiving it he asked if he could ask what he thought might be a stupid or silly question. I encouraged him to ask away. He said that he had seen a lady online who, after receiving her vaccination, had attached a spoon to her arm at the injection site thereby supporting the “theory” that Covid vaccinations are magnetised, or contain magnetic material. He said he had brought his own spoon. Trying hard to keep my eyebrows attached to my face I indicated that he sho...

So my new location is in Leith at the Community Treatment Centre. The staff are lovely, friendly and very efficient and effective. The clinic is very busy, indeed it is the busiest vaccine centre in Edinburgh city. However the setup and communication has not been so good. The centre has only three vaccination stations with admin and volunteer support to register and guide patients. Unfortunately, as our opening hours have been increased, rightly, to cope with demand, the admin and volunteer support has not always followed. This has made the end of the day problematic and chaotic at times. It is also not always clear who is in charge on any given day or shift which, with many of the staff being very experienced and self starting professionals, is not much of an issue but could become one if we have a problem to deal with that is not readily or easily resolved. There are also communication issues about what vaccines should be delivered to which groups. This has changed from time t...

Well, somewhat as expected, it took some time to establish and confirm my new location. On my very final Friday shift at the EICC I was told that I had been reallocated to Leith Community Treatment Centre (CTC) which is excellent news as it was my first choice location and is very local for me. However that allocation was not due to start until more than a week later and I was asked if I would take paid leave the following week. I asked if there were any locations that I could go to instead for a couple of shifts and they offered me two shifts on the vaccine bus on a student campus. The first bus shift proceeded fairly uneventfully but the second one almost failed to get started. For the second bus shift all of the vaccinators, the admin support and the bus arrived on time but there were no staff to unload the bus and assemble the site (tables, chairs, bins, substantial marquee, weights, sandbags etc) and no sign of any laptops, sharps bins and perhaps most crucially, any vaccines. ...