Covid-19 Vaccination update - 22nd January 2021.
Nursing Homes/Housebound Patients
Last weekend we completed the vaccinations for residents and staff at our local nursing homes. We are currently working through our cohort of patients that are normally housebound, but if you have a friend or relative over the age of 75 who could be brought to one of our vaccination clinics please contact us via our patient portal ‘Engage Consult’.
Next Vaccination Clinic
We will be running our first AstraZeneca vaccination clinic tomorrow from Kibworth Medical Centre on Smeeton Road. 650+ patients will be attending. This clinic is just for SLMG patients, as Billesdon Surgery and The Croft Medical Centre will be running clinics from their own sites. Please only attend if you have an appointment. We will not be able to give you a vaccination unless you have an appointment. As usual, we will have a reserve list and these patients will be contacted if we have any cancellations or DNA’s.
Face masks MUST be worn to protect you, other patients and our staff. If you are unable to wear a face mask you must inform us of this before attending your appointment. Please do not arrive early, as we do not want to keep you waiting unnecessarily. Please wear a warm coat, but make sure you wear a short-sleeved top underneath your outer layers so that the clinician can reach the top of your arm.
Please note - All other medical and dispensary services will not be open, so please contact 111 if you need medical help or advice during the weekend.
Further Clinics
Our planning is currently being hampered by the uncertainty of vaccine delivery. This is a national issue and all vaccination sites are struggling with this. However, it looks likely that we will have a further delivery of the vaccine towards the end of next week, and therefore our Primary Care Network (SLMG/The Croft/Billesdon Surgery) will hopefully be running clinics from Thursday 28th - Sunday 31st inclusive at the Old School Surgery. We will start contacting patients regarding this next week.
Prioritisation Groups
Please do not telephone the Practice to ask when you will be called for your vaccination. We are following the JCVI priority list and we cannot deviate from this:
- Residents in a care home for older adults and their carers
- All those 80 years of age and over and frontline health and social care workers
- All those 75 years of age and over
- All those 70 years of age and over and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
- All those 65 years of age and over
- All individuals aged 16 years to 64 years with underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of serious disease and mortality. Cohort 6 also includes unpaid carers*.
- All those 60 years of age and over
- All those 55 years of age and over
- All those 50 years of age and over
* We will be adding further communications regarding group 6 patients nearer the time.
We are on target to vaccinate groups 1-4 by the middle of February, but this does depend on vaccine delivery.
For further information about the prioritisation groups please click here.
Covid-19 Vaccination Update – 11th January 2021
As previously advised, SLMG are working in conjunction with our other Primary Care Network (PCN) practices to deliver the Covid-19 vaccination programme. Currently all clinics are being held at the Old School Surgery in Kibworth. This site was chosen by NHSE, because we could totally dedicate the site for the delivery of the vaccination programme. Kibworth Medical Centre was not approved due to the fact that we still need to provide existing GP Services, and we could not totally dedicate this site for vaccinations only.
The clinics started on 29th December, and so far the three practices involved (SLMG, Billesdon Surgery and the Croft Medical Centre) have completed 2,237 vaccinations. SLMG have completed the majority of the vaccinations, and our figure currently stands at 1341. We had quite a few cancellations on Saturday 9th January, and therefore some of our >75 age group were invited to attend at short notice. However, we have still not completed the >80’s age group in its entirety.
To date, we have received delivery of the Pfizer vaccine. This does make it extremely difficult to plan, as we are only given 24 hours’ notice of delivery, and the vaccine must be used within 3.5 days. All patients need to be observed for 15 minutes after the vaccine, and therefore we are limited to the number of patients we can have in the building at any one time due to social distancing rules. Logistically, we are hoping things will be easier when we start vaccinating with the Astra-Zeneca vaccine, as the storage/timescales/transportation is far less onerous and the observation time does not currently need to be adhered to. We may be able to offer the Astra-Zeneca vaccine programme at some of our other sites in the future, but this is dependent on approval from NHSE. We are also looking at offering on-line appointments when we move down the JCVI groups.
For the next few weeks we will be vaccinating all of our nursing homes, and we will also be planning to visit our >80’s housebound patients.
All patients that were vaccinated from 29th – 31st December will unfortunately not be able to attend their pre-booked appointment for their second dose w/c 18th January as originally planned. We will be writing to all of these patients from tomorrow. This is because the Government have changed the timescales on receiving the second dose and increased this from 3 weeks to a maximum of 12 weeks. We do not currently know when we will be receiving the Pfizer vaccine for patients who need their second dose, and therefore we will be contacting patients again when this is confirmed.
Please do not contact the practice for information about the COVID-19 vaccination programme. We are working within the JCVI guidance and we cannot deviate from this. If you are a healthcare worker and believe you fit the current criteria, please contact us via our on-line portal - Engage Consult. We will ask for relevant documentation to confirm your eligibility prior to booking an appointment for you. If you work for a nursing home, the GP practice that covers the nursing home will make contact with the nursing home manager and arrange your vaccination.
Non Covid-19 appointments - How you can help us –
In order to provide this vital vaccination service at such a challenging time for everyone we are asking for your help:
- Please understand that your pre-booked appointment for non-Covid-19 services with a GP/clinician may need to be rearranged at short notice. We are only given 24 hours’ notice of when our vaccine will be delivered and therefore it is possible that we will have to rearrange some appointments in order to release members of our team to vaccinate our patients. We are not provided with extra staff to make this happen so we have to redeploy existing team members to administer the vaccine. This will also take non-clinical staff away from our telephone lines, as each vaccinator needs an administrator to work alongside them.
- Where you feel it is safe to do so, please consider postponing non urgent appointments. However, if you are worried that your reason for seeing a clinician could be something serious then you should of course continue to access care from the practice in the normal way. In particular, you should never delay seeing a clinician if you have symptoms that you are worried could be related to cancer or other serious illness.
- If you have registered for our on-line services, including our patient portal ‘Engage Consult’, please use this facility and leave the phone lines free for patients that do not have internet access. If you have not registered for on-line services and are able to do so, please register at the earliest opportunity.
We are grateful for your understanding. We assure you that we are doing everything we can to get eligible patients vaccinated at the earliest opportunity.