Arena to be fully fledged mass vaccination centre
DERBY Arena is to become a fullyfledged mass vaccination centre, vaccinating thousands of residents every day.
The converted Arena opened its doors as the largest vaccination “site” in Derbyshire on January 7. It was not classified as a “mass vaccination” centre and is not yet scaled up to its full potential.
Now, local health chiefs have revealed that from Monday it will become a mass vaccination centre and will be “motoring through really significant numbers” of Covid-19 jabs a day. This will still be strictly by appointment only.
The plan for the site, due to its larger amount of parking and access to transport links, was to start off small, matching similar outputs as other local vaccination sites, administering a few hundred jabs a day. After this, the plan was to increase capacity drastically, as supply of vaccines permits, into four figures per day.
As a mass vaccination centre it would likely match similar outputs to Birmingham’s Millennium Point, which vaccinates 2,500 a day.
In a Derby City Council health and well-being meeting on January 14, Chris Clayton, chief executive of the Derby and Derbyshire Clinical Commissioning Group – which oversees health services in the county and city – gave an update on the vaccine rollout.
He said: “Derbyshire is pulling its weight in this, we have got up to a running start on it, initially through our hospitals and now increasingly in our communities through local vaccination services through genleaders eral practice. It is a really positive position. We have done thousands of vaccines so far. The Midlands is doing comparatively well in this and we have been playing our part.
“The Arena is a special case in point because we have done something very, very innovative there, which when you do something innovative and different it brings slightly different challenges.
“We brought together the five primary care networks in Derby [containing 30 GP practices] and put them in one place in the Arena. The Arena, we are just waiting for final confirmation, will also go live as a vaccination centre and we are hoping that will go live on Monday. “That used to be called, in old parlance, a mass vaccination site, we now call them vaccination centres and so towards the end of January we will be motoring through really significant numbers at that site and it will be just really, really good. We recognise there will be challenges and we need to build public confidence in this programme.”
Derby Arena spent 72 hours standing idle after it started administering hundreds of vaccines a day from January 7 to January 10. It ran out of vaccine, an issue health officials were aware of when it opened. Fresh supply of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine rolled in last Wednesday, allowing it to recommence vaccinations.
Health officials say they will be administering as many vaccines as they can per day, using whichever vaccines are available, including the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab. Missed appointments will not see jabs wasted.
They have also sought to allay any concerns raised by the Arena standing
idle, saying the Derbyshire rollout is on track and hopes to vaccinate the four highest priority population groups by the Government’s target of mid-February.
Mr Clayton says he has confidence Derbyshire can hit the target, if supply and logistics hold up.
The four priority groups for vaccinations, currently receiving the jab are: Residents in care homes and their carers; patients aged 80 or over and frontline health and social care workers; patients aged 75 and over; and patients aged 70 and over alongside any residents aged 16-69 who are clinically extremely vulnerable. There are 240,829 people in Derbyshire, including Derby, which fall into these four categories.
Local vaccination figures are not being made available, by either local of the central NHS, just at a regional level.
The University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Royal Derby Hospital and Queen’s Hospital in Burton, said it had vaccinated more than 10,000 people (see above).
Gavin Boyle, chief executive of the trust, said in last week’s city council meeting that the trust had vacci
nated 1,300 people who had “opportunistically” taken up the Covid-19 vaccine while in hospital for other appointments.
Dr Meryl Watkins, a Derby GP speaking at the meeting, said the hospital trust had vaccinated more than 3,500 care home staff.
Dr Watkins, who has been putting in shifts at Derby Arena herself, said: “Some over-80s are housebound
and don’t want to go to Derby Arena. There are quite a number of patients who do not want to travel that far for all kinds of reasons. The staff are ready and waiting.”
She said the Oxford vaccine should help improve that situation. It does not have the restrictions of having to be kept at -70C.
Dr Watkins also said patients calling their GPs to ask when their vaccine slot will be were delaying other patients receiving care and also getting other patients in to receive their vaccine. She stressed a need for this to stop and for patients to wait until they are contacted.
In a South Derbyshire District Council meeting last week, Clive Newman, the CCG’s director of GP development, said there was an aim to vaccinate 98% of health staff by the end of January. He and Mr Clayton have both said there is a national aim and high confidence that all Derbyshire care home staff would have been given the Covid-19 vaccine by the end of this week.