Back to Practice with Covid-19

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. ...

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 ...