VACCINE DELAY FOR CARE HOMES
Residents left in the dark as roll-out of vital jab begins
A TINY fraction of Scotland’s care home residents will get the coronavirus vaccine when it is rolled out to them this week.
Elderly people living in a home in Hamilton, Lanarkshire, are today expected to become the f i rst in Scotland to be immunised.
It is a landmark moment in the battle against Covid-19, which has been a factor in the death of nearly 2,400 care home residents since the beginning of the pandemic.
But the vast majority of Scotland’s 36,000 older people living in nursing homes are still in the dark about when the vaccination programme will be extended to them.
Only a ‘few hundred’ residents over the age of 80 are expected to be vaccinated from the first supply of 65,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab – with most likely to be waiting until well into the new year.
Care home operators also said they are still unaware of details of the plan to rollout lateral flow tests for visitors, even though it is supposed to get under way today.
Donald Macaskill, chief executive of Scottish Care, said: ‘We are bound by the availability of the vaccine, and at the moment we are only dealing with the Pfizer vaccine, and so what we would be anticipating at this stage is that the roll-out would be small.
‘We are aware of a number of homes that have been alerted that there will be teams from the NHS coming to vaccinate. We don’t know the precise figures on that but we are aware there will be a reasonable number of homes which wil l begin t he v acci nation programme around the country, concentrating on the over-80s.
‘It’s a slow start but it is important, not just symbolically but also for the individuals involved.’
Asked how many residents will benefit from the initial roll-out of the Pfizer vaccine, he said that ‘we are not talking about thousands of people but we are certainly talking about hundreds of people’.
He said the aim was to vaccinate all residents ‘ as quickly as possible’, but added: ‘The time-frame is as published by the Government, which is that everybody in phase one will be completed by April, or by Easter. It is clearly our hope that if the NHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) sign off the other vaccines, particularly the AstraZeneca one, because of its ease of distribution, then we can speed that up.’
Robert Kilgour, executive director of Renaissance Care, said none of his 15 homes has been informed of any plans to vaccinate residents – and they are also still waiting for details of the delivery of lateral flow test kits for visitors, which are also supposed to be rolled out to all facilities from today.
He said: ‘We’ve got the day job to do and we’ve been told to get ready for both the lateral flow test kit deliveries and the training for staff for that, which we’ve done this past week, and for vaccination of residents, although care homes with an outbreak in the past 28 days don’t qualify and we’ve got a couple in that category.
‘I’m always hopeful of better communication from the Scottish Government because they are very good at the soundbite podium promises that we’ve had from the beginning of this and less good at the frontline delivery, with style over substance.
‘It is a concern and is disappointing and hugely frustrating but it is sadly what we’ve got used to.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘The changing nature of vaccine availability and the logistics of transporting this vaccine, mean that it is not possible at this point to set targets. The priority groups we can offer the vaccine to, and the number of people we can reach, depends on the supply.’