Waterside Medical PracticeThe 3 Havant Borough Primary Care Networks have been working with the 11 GP practices to deliver the COVID Vaccination Programme at our 3 Havant Borough sites. It was incredibly important to us to vaccinate people as quickly as supplies would allow and to protect our most vulnerable. To this end we opened 3 sites. Since December we have done almost 100k vaccines (20k on Hayling Island), local COVID rates are low and society is starting to open up – it’s been a huge success and testament to the sheer hard work put in by everyone. It is also thanks to the population coming forward to be vaccinated quickly, the volunteers, our workforce and the GP practices. We are very proud of having some of the highest vaccination rates in England. Since the start of the programme it has been very important to us that we deliver good routine and emergency healthcare alongside a successful vaccination programme. To achieve that we need to continue to adapt.
The impact of the Pfizer vaccine in particular is very considerable, as:
- 1. All patients have to wait for 15 mins afterwards – so there is a limit of how quickly we can go while maintaining social distancing
- 2. The vaccine comes in batches of 1170 doses and expires within a few days
Running a Pfizer clinic takes 2 complete days at the Health Centre, having a huge impact on normal services, especially nursing clinics. It was the right decision to do it at the start of our campaign, for our more elderly Hayling population, who couldn’t travel easily and also we wanted to get vaccines into arms as quickly as possible.
It is critical we acknowledge that now the balance has tipped and one of our other sites, Emsworth Baptist Church, has more capacity, which can be used to free up Hayling Health Centre again for its primary purpose. We simply cannot afford to cancel clinics for 2 days anymore on Hayling. We have therefore made the decision not to run any further Pfizer clinics from Hayling Health Centre, so we can protect our patients who have other primary healthcare needs.
We need to ask the patients who need either their first-dose or second-dose of Pfizer vaccine to travel the relatively short distance to either Emsworth Baptist Church or Waterlooville Health Centre. There is freeparking behind the Tesco Express in Emsworth. This will be those who had a 1st dose of Pfizer or those 18-39year olds not currently vaccinated, for whom Pfizer is now the recommended vaccine (as of last Friday’s JCVI recommendations). The 18-39 year olds will start to be invited as soon as we get permission and vaccine – we will work age down.
We are running second dose AstraZeneca clinics at Hayling Health Centre for the patients who already had their first doses on either 19th, 20th or 22nd March on 4th, 5th and 7th June respectively. Most of these patients had already been given their second appointments when they came for the first. These appointments still stand – we are looking forward to welcoming you.
Our workforce and volunteers are still supporting the other 2 vaccination sites, as it is a collaborative effort to make sure we finish this round of vaccinations and protect all of our population. We look forward to welcoming you. We are grateful for everyone’s patience and appreciation of the changes which are needed.
Dr Hannah Morgan, Clinical Director of Hayling Island and Emsworth Primary Care Network