Patient Update: Changes to Flu Clinics

Dear Patients

We ran our first flu vaccine clinic of this year on Saturday. Overall, it was a great success but we acknowledge that there remains room for improvement.

Many of you will be familiar with our previous processes, which have been built up over many years of experience of mass influenza vaccination. This year we have had to adjust our plans due to new processes required because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the intention of the Government to immunize many millions more people than in previous years.

Saturday was our first experience of the new processes. We are pleased to say that we immunised over 1500 people and are extremely proud that so many of your patients have had an immunisation to try and protect them against Seasonal Influenza so early on in this very important flu season. This is a significant proportion of our current flu vaccination eligible patients.

We are very thankful to all our staff who worked tirelessly behind the scenes in order to plan our clinics and who worked extremely hard on the day (mostly a day off) to deliver the service. This has been happening whilst we continue to deliver care on a day-to-day basis. Data suggests we are now back to delivering pre-lockdown levels of care activity and in some cases even higher numbers of people are contacting the surgery. We would also like to thank you, our patients, for working with us in these trying times and for your feedback on the flu clinic itself. We would also like to thank our neighbours and those of you in our immediate local community.

The clinic and processes were not perfect but this is naturally clearer in retrospect now that we have done our first clinic. We want to assure you all that we have taken on board your feedback and have refined our processes for future clinics;

1. We had proportionately much higher staff number per patients invited than our usual annual clinics. We will increase this future ratio for future clinics.
2. We have reviewed and will change our patient flow and queuing processes.
3. Given that so many of you elected to attend on the first clinic there will naturally be significantly fewer people attending our next planned clinics (30-60%).
4. We will continue to follow Public Health England infection control advice for vaccination and immunisation clinics.
5. We anticipate our changes should result in much better and much shorter queues. There will inevitably be some queuing but we hope it is of a much more acceptable level.

How can you help us? How can you help each other?

1. Please only attend during your appointment time window. Many people did not on Saturday. This resulted in much longer waits at the start and much shorter towards the end.
2. Those of you in the earliest slots please do not attend before the start time of the clinic. On Saturday, people began to queue from 08.00am with the clinic not starting until 0830am. This means the clinic starts with significant delays.
3. Please follow Social Distancing and infection control processes. Keep a safe distance and wear a face covering. This applies in all public settings in line with UK Government guidelines but of the utmost importance during flu clinic
4. Please drive and park considerately. We note comments of an inconsiderate and potentially unsafe approach to this. Please consider whether you need to drive and then think carefully about where you do park.
5. Be kind and tolerant of each other and our staff. There were instances of verbal abuse, bad language and aggression towards fellow patients and our staff. Whilst we understand the frustration, this behaviour cannot be tolerated.
6. Please comply with the screening questions and any directions given by staff as quickly as possible. This will give a smoother experience for all present.
7. Bear with us and continue to feed back where appropriate.
8. For those who have understandably asked why we are not running the clinics during the week. It is because we are already delivering acute and routine care at capacity all day every day. It would be impossible to add on vaccination of thousands of people, with the current Covid-19 precautions. Attempts at this are likely to be less ‘Covid-19 safe’ and if attempted would mean many may not be vaccinated until well into the Flu season and perhaps even into the New Year.
9. If you have a significant disability which means you cannot queue for periods of time then please do identify yourselves to the staff at the entrance to the vaccination area.
10. Please be aware that there are different Vaccines for different groups/cohorts. We are unable to give the different groups the vaccines at the same time. Currently we are only able to give the over-65s vaccine. We have planned to take delivery of further vaccine types in the coming weeks.

Thank you for your understanding and co-operation

Published: Sep 18, 2020