Patience urged by those arriving for vaccine appointments

Alberta Health Services is asking those with appointments for the COVID vaccine to be patient while additional measures are put in place.

“We are adding additional staff and signage at sites to encourage people with appointments to wait in their vehicles until their appointment times. Each appointment is booked in 10-minute increments. This helps ensure we can maintain social distancing at all immunization clinics,” reads an AHS press release.

In Medicine Hat there have been two cases, who have called the News, where seniors in their 90s waited outside in the cold for more than 40 minutes on Thursday outside Higdon Hall.

The AHS press release says people are arriving for their appointment far too early, resulting in the outside wait.

“We ask that all clients wait in their cars until five minutes before their appointment and not arrive more than 10 minutes early.”

AHS is also requesting, unless the senior requires assistance, that they enter the facility alone.

Health Minister Tyler Shandro says by Friday morning more than 100,000 seniors born in 1946 or earlier have got appointments booked.

Another 22,000 who live in congregate settings are also booked. Thousands more have booked appointments at pharmacies in Calgary, Edmonton and Red Deer where this is an option. In Medicine Hat the option of a vaccine shot at a pharmacy is not yet available.

With the number of appointments booked so far it means more than half the eligible 230,000 seniors have a booked appointment.

“This milestone however, doesn’t mean we can let our guard down. Yesterday, despite reassurances that the online vaccine booking tool was capable of handling a large volume of bookings, Alberta Health Services fell short of Albertans’ collective expectations,” said Shandro in a statement.

Since Wednesday when the “booking tools” were launched there have been a number of issues where people could not get through on the phone and were not able to book online.

“The online booking tool is now capable of handling more than 5,000 bookings per hour and the long wait times have subsided. I have further directed Alberta Health Services to add more servers, hire more staff, and add more phone lines over and above what may be needed for future phases of the vaccine deployment,” said Shandro.