Minutes:
Sarah Carter, Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Clinical Commissioning Group, gave an update on the Covid-19 Vaccination Plan. She highlighted the following information:
a) Letters inviting people to book a vaccination appointment have been sent out to all those in the top four priority cohorts.
b) As of 7 February, 186,000 vaccinations had been delivered across the system and delivery is on track to meet the national target for vaccinating those in the top four priority cohorts.
c) At close of play on 7 February, in the City 81% of over 80s had been vaccinated; 77% of over 75s had been vaccinated; 63% of over 70s had been vaccinated and all residents in older adult care homes had been vaccinated (or there were plans for the roving service to deliver a vaccination if they had been unable to due to infection prevention and control measures in place).
d) Nottinghamshire County Council Contact Centre is contacting those in eligible cohorts who have not yet received, or booked to receive the vaccine.
e) Later this week the next cohort will be contacted about booking their vaccination appointment.
f) Over 50,000 appointments were available across the City and County during the following week.
g) An Equalities Group has been established to review uptake data, identify areas of low uptake and make recommendations for increasing uptake through hyper-local solutions. This may include use of a roving service, pop-up clinics and support with pharmacy applications to deliver the vaccine.
During subsequent discussion the following points were raised:
h) It was always known that there would be variable levels of take-up and some of the reasons for that were predictable.
i) All housebound individuals should have received letters about the options available to them and GPs are also contacting individuals who they know may face particular difficulties. The roving service is currently in operation and individuals can contact the Nottinghamshire County Contact Centre about accessing this.
j) Vaccination rates in the City have been lower than elsewhere in the country. Progress is being made every day but as numbers of unvaccinated people in a particular cohort become smaller it becomes more difficult to continue delivering vaccines at the same rate. It isn’t expected that a 100% vaccination rate of all those in the top four priority groups will be achieved – the aim is to get mid-90% vaccinated by the national target date. There are sufficient appointments and vaccine to achieve this.
k) There may be challenges in understanding information, booking appointments and responding to reminder calls for those who do not speak English as a first language.
l) It is good to have City-specific data on vaccinations and it was confirmed that this can be made available on a regular basis.
m) When they receive their first vaccination, everyone gets a date for their second vaccination appointment and capacity for delivering second vaccines is built into the programme plan.
n) Voluntary sector organisations were asked if they had any workers eligible to be in the Priority Cohort 2b and those identified as being in that category will have been prioritised for vaccine access.
o) Lots of communication is taking place about appointment availability, including that same-day appointments can often be available.
Nottingham City Council’s Director of Adult Social Care confirmed that work was taking place to ensure that frontline care workers can book vaccination appointments. Independent care providers have been contacted and asked to provide feedback on vaccination rates amongst their workforce so that it can be identified if more needs to be done. There is a dedicated email addresss for the adult social care workforce to raise any issues. In addition, all those in receipt of direct payments who have assistants supporting them have been contacted with booking details.