I was offered 15 miles away in 3 weeks time. After refreshing the booking system page 3 times, I was suddenly offered a local pharmacy today. The booking system, like all other NHS IT infrastructure, is terrible. It's worth logging out and in several times.
Yes, interesting. Similar for me.
Unlike the first and second vaccination, which were conducted at my local GP and for which I received text message invitations and a simple booking site, I received nothing for my booster vaccination.
The mess of changes about who could book and when didn't help.
At just under 6 months after my second vaccination, but spurred on by a poster here, I went to look for an appointment, and found one in a small chemist in Cheadle Hulme but nothing in Wilmslow, which surprised me. The appointment was for a couple of weeks in the future also.
I took the appointment and it worked fine.
However I have a 'flu vaccination booked in a much larger chemist in the middle of Wilmslow this week and i intend to ask them whether or not they also dispense the Covid vaccine, because they never showed up on the booking system when I used it more than once. It seems surprising to me that no location in Wilmslow for the vaccination exists.
My conclusion is that it's a bit of a mess, made worse by constant changes of direction by the government shopping trolley, but it's just about fit for purpose in the sense that I got my booster vaccination just a bit more than six months after my second original vaccination. If the move is now to have these vaccinations performed by pharmacists in chemists that seems fine to me, the original vaccination was a major undertaking and my GP handled it well but it could now become more "business as usual" and they can catch up on other tasks.
I expect a continuing need for Covid vaccination, but combining the process with the 'flu vaccination appears sensible to me also, at the moment the processes seem totally separate. I can manage the bureaucracy if this continues to be the case as long as there's an on-line booking system I can tap into, but this won't be as easy for a significant subset of the population as it is for me.
EDIT PS It took me about an hour to get to the chemist in Cheadle Hulme and £2.80 for the return train ticket, I have the time and the walking exercise was good for me. But I live within 10 minutes' walk of a number of chemists in Wilmslow.