Speaking from sort of the inside . No notice at all as far as GP's are concerned from what I can see.
Speaking with the staff at the centre I went to, their trouble was the fact it took so long to get the official paperwork to confirm they could open up the booster programme. They were all ready to go, but were waiting on written confirmation.
I managed to book mine yesterday for Wednesday, so I think it depends on the vaccine centre more than anything.
The problem is that Boris made his announcement last night in a pre recorded message but the infrastructure to carry it out is not yet in place.
Our nearest walk in is 17 miles away even though I live in a city of 300,000 (?) people.
How would that stop the entire populations of towns all turning up to the same place at the same time?
They wouldn't. Not everyone is off work at the same time, for example.
Not everyone has the time to speculatively go to a walk in centre and queue for an open-ended amount of time. Particularly outside major urban areas, where the nearest centre may be 10+ miles away.
Picking up on that, what is shortest time in which someone could go from no vaccination to having the booster ? To keep it simpler (if not realistic), assume all doses can be obtained without delay.
I thought the reason for abolishing the delay was to speed up the process and allow the centres to do more jabs.
My local walking centre is run by the local doctors and is not listed on the NHS website maybe this is the same for yourself?
It wouldn't make any difference at either place I attended. It would save my GP from putting up a marquee in the car park again, no small inconvenience, but it had no effect on the number and speed of injections they were managing.
It is. It's just that Boris has the inability to articulate this point. Shorter queues make going to a walk up centre more attractive. The wait is a serious bottleneck. They can jab you in 2 minutes flat, but the centre I went to had only 5 seats for the wait afterwards. Another option would be to stop the silly seat cleaning theatre. Covid does not soak through your trousers and go up your bum.
This tallies with my local experience of excellent GP-led vaccination in the first place followed by poor booster availability through local pharmacies. Some people would have found it hard to find a suitable location for them; I had to take the train to Cheadle Hulme which wasn't too serious an imposition although a waste of my time in one way. I believe that pharmacies make sense, especially without the need to hang around afterwards, and I recall that with the 'flu vaccination I had recently I had to complete a thorough questionnaire about allergies in advance as well as being asked again at the time of vaccination.
Looks like they've grafted film of someone's mouth moving over a still photo of him. I'm sure they haven't but he's not exactly a natural. Jonathan Van Tam would have been a better choice. Or perhaps Mr Tumble.
Agreed, I was expecting him to fire lasers from his eyes.
I agree.
But Boris can't say this, he has to try and turn it into something different, and he was just stupid in what he said. The evidence is that something like a 30% increase in throughput can be achieved by abolishing the wait, and that's going to lead to more vaccinations which will more than outweigh the problems caused by not waiting. Which is a good reason. Nothing to do with making the process more "attractive" although based on recent queues this might be a good side-effect.
I believe that analysis, but a friend volunteering at the local vaccination centre told me that the 15 minute wait was also introduced because they were having a very small number of incidents with people suffering shock reactions heading to the car park, and losing capacity as first aiders had to step away from vaccination to treating them.
