Back to Practice with Covid-19

Well I seem to be becoming a Vaccine Centre closure specialist. First QMU drive through and now the EICC mass vaccination centre. After four months at QMU it was closed down in early June. And now after what will be a further three months at the EICC it too is now scheduled to close on Sun 19 th   Sep. As of this moment I do not yet know where I will end up. We have been told that all of the current Edinburgh Health Centre sites will continue and perhaps expand and a number of new smaller sites will open across the city. There will also be opportunities in centres throughout the rest of Lothian. We have been told that NHS Lothian are keen to retain all of their current staff, offering substantive posts to any who are eligible and want them, and offering extensions from the end of Oct 2021 to the end of Mar 2022 to those of us who wish to remain temporary and will happily stop when the need for vaccine delivery can be met from within existing staff resources. It seems unfortunat...

It's been a month or so since my last post and that's largely because the work at EICC has been mostly slow and unremarkable. Most shifts are quiet to start with and pick up a bit as the day progresses. This makes sense when many of our clients are drop-ins rather than appointments. Few people think of dropping in between 8 and 9am unsurprisingly. My shift patterns at EICC are the oddest thing to report. Not sure if a human or an algorithm sets the staff rosters but it is far less varied than the shift pattern at QMU. For the whole of July I have only worked 07:30 to 15:30 shifts and only later in the week (Thu, Fri, Sat or Sun), despite availability throughout the week. However next month's shifts appeared recently and they were even odder. Again only shifts in the second half of the week and now only four hour stints! So 15:30 to 19:30 Thu, Fri, Sat Sun, then the same days the following week but 11:30 to 15:30. I'm quite sure I do not want to be working 4 days ...

Well it’s been a wee while since I last updated folks but as I have had a couple of weeks annual leave I have only undertaken two shifts since the closure of the QMU site. My first shift was an 8 hour Saturday shift at EICC which was quietly steady but not really that busy. Quite a good way to begin to get to grips with the different processes and systems in place. There were a number of colleagues there from QMU as well as a few from my earlier life in health visiting in Edinburgh. It was a perfectly reasonable place to work even if the passing of the day in the outside world was completely invisible. The following day a small number of us were asked to staff a drop-in surge clinic in the south of the city, set up in a GP surgery at short notice to facilitate access for local people over the age of 40 to their first or second vaccine dose. Unfortunately I’m not sure how well it was advertised in advance as the only way we managed to drum up any business at all was to head across ...

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 ...

After our initial return to Pfizer we have switched once again to AstraZenica. This has roughly corresponded with when we made the switch in March so that we can continue to provide second doses to the same cohort of people. As we power through May we are now regularly seeing 700 cars each day and delivering first and second doses on a ratio of about 1:5. As a result I have increased my hours for the next month or so from 16 to 24 hours a week. It all feels very well paced, useful and satisfying. We mostly see people in their fifties and upwards coming for their second jag and some younger people for their first. However AstraZenica is not now offered to anyone under 30 and anyone under 40 can choose to have it or opt to be sent elsewhere for an alternative. Quite a few thirtysomethings seem happy enough to opt for the AstraZenica once they have had a chat with a vaccinator. On another, sadder note the drive through service at QMU is ending next month. We will deliver our final ...

I'm told this article is due to appear in the current issue of Community Practitioner ( https://www.communitypractitioner.co.uk/ ). I'm not able to verify this as access to the journal is via membership access. It's based on a few of my earlier blog entries.  

Full on with second doses now. And May is not living up to its springtime billing so far! It has been very cold and wet at times. On my first day administering second jags I noticed that all of the clients were from a particular date in February and that the following day they would correspond with my first shift as a vaccinator. I wondered if I would meet anyone to whom I had given a first jab. The third client tuned out to one such person as indeed did a few others over the course on my second shift. It was very nice to meet up with people a second time. We are now picking up a clearer picture of reactions to first jags and it seems pretty minimal with the Pfizer. Of the many dozen second doses I have now given, the vast majority reported little or no side effects with only a couple reporting feelings of being unwell for a few days. The numbers are also back up to better levels than in April with figures above 500 most days. This certainly helps the shifts to rattle along if y...