Peter Furness

Patient ‘safety’ checks are causing deadly vaccination delays

(Photo: Getty)

I have now observed a Covid-19 vaccination hub from both sides. As a patient waiting outside in a three-hour queue, much of it in the rain, I wondered why everything was moving so slowly. As a volunteer doctor working on the inside, I saw numerous good-hearted colleagues trying their hardest, bursting a gut to make the system work. Why the difference?

I have concluded that the NHS approach to patient safety is a very significant contributor to vaccination delays. There has been national publicity around the mandatory training for potential volunteers before they can start work, which has included ‘diversity’ and ‘counter-extremism’ training. A friend who is a recently retired senior nurse was also told she’d need to do basic training in how to administer an intramuscular injection, something she’d been doing most of her life without incident. She snorted with derision and refused.

But it’s not just silly training rules before people start work. Inside the hub I watched as each patient was taken through lists of safety-related questions – often duplicated – before a needle was unsheathed. Could they have been given information and invited to answer the questions on a form while queueing? Could the laborious booking-in system have been made more efficient? Apparently not. The procedures have been defined centrally and we have to follow them.

I described this to a long-retired GP I know. That generated another snort of derision. He told me how he had once been asked to vaccinate all the pupils in a school. He and one assistant vaccinated them all, about 800 pupils, in one day.

The vaccination hub where I worked had six vaccinators, six booking-in administrators and a similar number of people managing the queue. There were also several ‘first responders’, there just in case there was a serious allergic reaction.

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