Shelagh Fogarty:

Idiscovered this week that all it took for me to cry tears of joy and relief during a live broadcast was a text telling me my 89-yearold mother had received her first Covid vaccine injection. I was talking about the vaccine rollout anyway when the text came in and I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. The lovely listeners to my LBC show shared my joy and relief and told me of their own – but others called to tell me they were still waiting, still experiencing the same black hole of communication that my family had experienced.

My mum got her injection from her wonderful and trusted GP at the local primary care vaccine hub and, like most people, we feel a mixture of immense relief and gratitude. Even so, her vaccine only happened because I stopped being a patient, passive daughter and decided I needed an answer to a simple question: when and where would her jab happen?

Anyone who dealt with the labyrinthine NHS appointments system in pre-covid times will know that assurances to the over-eighties and their families that they haven’t been forgotten don’t hold much water. So when I woke up on Monday to hear that the over-seventies were about to start receiving their vaccines, I decided to finally call Mum’s GP surgery, against all the advice and pleas from the NHS.

She is almost 90 and has multiple health issues, yet nobody had told us anything about the plan. Waiting with no news was becoming a form of mental torture. If someone so vulnerable hadn’t had the vaccine, while friends’ parents who are less at risk had had both Pfizer jabs, I needed to know why.

As ever with the NHS, we are supplicants whenever we deal with our bit of the vast network that makes up this sainted but flawed organisation. I dialled the surgery number with nervous fingers, concerned I was adding to the workload of an overstretched team.

I needn’t have worried. Within minutes I’d established the problem. Mum’s notes say “housebound”, which is true to the extent that she gets her GP and community care at home, but she is able to leave the house with our help. All patients marked “housebound” are put down for home vaccination, which means the Oxford/ Astrazeneca jab because the Pfizer one can’t be transported house to house. It makes perfect sense, but nobody told Mum or her family that this was the reason for the wait. Once I said we could take her to the local Gp-led vaccination hub, we were booked in 24 hours later. It was as simple as that.

I now know, a day on, that many of my listeners followed my lead and got appointments as a result. But I also heard from many who were confused and frustrated about what to do with a letter from the NHS giving them the option of using one of the new large vaccine centres. Others had received no letter at all.

It is clear to me that a large number of housebound and elderly people need someone to help them navigate the system and to talk through the three options of home, local hub or large centre.

This is difficult enough for those who have the support of children, grandchildren or other carers who are, in many cases, just as confused about what best to do. I can only fear for those who don’t have such a network.

We know that a huge job is facing the Government, the NHS and all those who are helping with the rollout, but these are our elders we are talking about. They deserve to be told what’s going on.