Flu / covid clinic 9th October 2024
The practice would like to apologise for all patients left waiting for their vaccinations in this afternoon’s clinic. We are disappointed to see that despite our effort’s patients were left waiting and this is not acceptable.
To explain we offered 8 doctors/clinicians vaccinating with another 8 staff supporting the admin and a further 8 staff coordinating patients through the building.
We booked each patient in on a 2-minute interval as this has worked for us in the past. We text all patients before and, on the day, to advise do not turn up early for your appointment. The first 8 patients were booked in for 1.30p.m. when we opened our doors.
At 1.20p.m. we were surprised to find we had 50 patients queuing across the car park when our doors were not yet open, and unfortunately this then created the unacceptable chaos that continued, and we were unable to find patients by time and had to move the queue as soon as we could to get through the afternoon. This was not our plan, and we do apologise for this.
Many patients have stated they will go to the pharmacists in future, and this is of course your prerogative, but we do find many patients do like the comfort of having a doctor on hand should they suffer a reaction. Also, you may find that should we stop offering clinics in GP Practices the pharmacies would be faced with the same issues of overdemand, and the queuing would also move.
As a practice we are funded less and less for the flu vaccination, and 50% less for the covid vaccination. The government still insists on a signed consent form for covid, and so as we are unable to afford to post this consent form to our patients, we must have a process of getting this to you when you enter the building with all your details completed, causing further administration issues in the service we deliver.
We are also aware that we have a vulnerable population of more than 2500 patients who we would like to offer vaccinations to in a very short period to offer the best protection.
As a practice we also know we are very busy all day offering appointments for doctor’s nurses and bloods, and we would struggle to be able to offer the additional time to have the luxury of vaccination appointments during the ‘usual’ day, so do try and offer a flu & covid dedicated session trying to get 500-patients in at a time.
I do accept this is not ideal as many patients would prefer smaller timed ‘check in’ clinics (as would we) however we do need to consider balancing this with the point that we would not physically be able to offer the number of vaccines we currently offer our patients.
Flu vaccinations used to be a service we could deliver which could also ‘prop up’ the underfunding from the government into primary care, but with prices of vaccines increasing and the cost of delivering the service increasing and no additional change in funding for more than 8 years, we may have to rethink our options in the future.
We would love to keep our patients happy and feel this session did not a good response. We perhaps as a practice consider not offering vaccines in future years if this is not making patients happy, as this additional service also comes with a risk off loss to the practice as we must agree to purchase the vaccines in advance, and risk being left with unused stock. We do feel torn between the desire to continue to offer flu vaccinations at the practice however we also need to concentrate on the ‘day job’.
Perhaps we should offer vaccines in future in small, timed clinics where we can only see 50 per day, meaning we can either only vaccinate half as many patients or patients who want a vaccination in their own practice would have to wait up to 12 weeks to get their appointment.
We would welcome patient feedback and we once again apologise for the October afternoon to any patients who were left waiting unacceptably.