Hampshire GP reveals details on how Covid-19 vaccination programme will likely work

Chief executive of the Wessex Local Medical Committees and Hampshire GP Dr Nigel Watson has spoken about the planning going on to ensure a smooth roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines.

It comes after two Covid-19 vaccines, with over 90 per cent effectiveness, were announced by US company Moderna and the partnership between Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Dr Watson said: ‘The plan is to look at the most at-risk people first so those are people in care homes, the housebound and the over-80s. So we are looking at three ways of doing it.

‘One is in local centres which will largely be run by GPs working collaboratively together.

‘There is the roving model which will be visiting people at home who need it who are housebound, and the third bit is the mass vaccination centres where we will be able to pick up significant numbers of people who need to be vaccinated.’

NHS England has reportedly told local leaders that each of the 42 health and care systems should have at least one mass vaccination site, according to the Health Service Journal.

Health secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC Radio 4 programme that volunteers are currently being trained with ‘big numbers’ of people getting vaccinating in the new year, but ministers are holding out ‘hope that we might get some going in December this year’.

Dr Watson told radio listeners that he was ‘optimistic’ about the vaccination programme.

He added: ‘This is the biggest vaccination programme in history and therefore we are going to need to expand the workforce over the winter period.

‘People are already extended in hospitals, in general practice and the community trying to cope with the workload that there is at the moment so we are going to expand the workforce but it will all be done safely with clinical supervision, with people working together in teams to be able to vaccinate the numbers we are going to need to get through to protect our population.

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‘It is being planned locally and it is an enormous task but we need to phase the delivery so they don’t all come on a Monday morning. Some centres will be vaccinating at weekends and that is part of the planning process that will be done in every local area.’

The UK has ordered 40 million doses of the vaccine made by Pfizer and 5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine with the first batches of the Pfizer vaccine arriving in December if it is approved.

Authorities have also placed orders for 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine, which is yet to publish its efficiency results but scientists at the University of Oxford hope to have Phase 3 trial results by Christmas.

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