More than a hundred pharmacies will offer jabs without an appointment.
From Monday, people across Calder and the surrounding region will be able to walk into one of 114 community pharmacies and receive their winter flu and respiratory vaccines without booking an appointment. The scheme, announced by the regional health board on Thursday, is the largest expansion of pharmacy vaccination the region has attempted and is intended to take pressure off GP surgeries during what officials expect to be a demanding season.
Eligible groups include everyone aged sixty-five and over, adults with long-term conditions such as diabetes, asthma and heart disease, pregnant women, carers and front-line health and social care staff. Children remain covered by the school-based nasal spray programme and are not included in the walk-in offer.
Who can go, and where
The participating pharmacies are spread across the region, with 41 in the city of Calder, 18 in Harrow and Harrow Moor, 15 in Port Selwyn, 12 in Ardle and the rest in market towns and villages in the valley and the hill towns. Each will display a poster in the window, and a full list is available from the health board and at every GP surgery. Most will offer vaccines throughout their normal opening hours, though some smaller branches will run dedicated walk-in sessions on set days.
Patients are asked to bring some form of identification and, if possible, a note of any regular medicines. Pharmacists will check eligibility, ask a short set of health questions and record the vaccine on the patient’s medical record so their GP can see it. The whole process typically takes around ten minutes, including a short wait afterwards.
“Last winter we had people waiting three weeks for a surgery slot for a jab that takes two minutes to give. That made no sense for them or for us. Pharmacies are on every high street, they’re open evenings and weekends, and our pharmacists are fully trained to do this,” said Dr Roisin Mahoney-Clarke, the health board’s director of public health.
Dr Mahoney-Clarke said the board had ordered enough vaccine to cover about 420,000 people across the region, a ten per cent increase on last year, and that pharmacies would be resupplied twice a week to avoid shortages.
Why now
Health officials say the timing reflects early signals from abroad, where the southern hemisphere’s winter saw an earlier and sharper flu season than usual. Hospital admissions for respiratory illness in Calder rose by about a quarter between mid-October and early November, according to the latest weekly figures, with the largest increase among people over seventy-five.
Last winter, the region’s main hospitals declared critical incidents on three occasions in January as beds filled with patients suffering from flu and other respiratory infections. Officials believe that raising vaccine uptake among older adults by even a few percentage points could prevent hundreds of admissions.
Uptake has been falling in some groups. Among adults under sixty-five with long-term conditions, only around half were vaccinated last year, and the figure was lower still in parts of Harrow and the east of the city. The health board hopes that removing the need to book – and allowing people to be vaccinated when they are already collecting a prescription – will make the biggest difference there.
Pharmacists’ concerns
The region’s pharmacists have broadly welcomed the scheme but warned about workload. Many branches are already stretched by staff shortages and rising prescription volumes, and some smaller independents have chosen not to take part.
Imran Valdés, who owns two pharmacies in Ardle and chairs the local pharmacy committee, said the fee paid per vaccine was fair but would not cover the cost of extra staff on its own. “On a busy Monday morning we could have twenty people in for jabs while also trying to dispense two hundred prescriptions,” he said. “People need to be patient. We will get to them, but there may be a queue.” He suggested that people who could visit mid-afternoon or on weekdays rather than Saturdays would find shorter waits.
GP surgeries will continue to offer vaccines by appointment, and housebound patients will still be visited at home by community nurses. People who are unsure whether they are eligible are being urged to ask their pharmacist rather than going without.
The walk-in offer will run until the end of February. The health board will publish weekly uptake figures for each area, and says it will consider extending the scheme to other vaccines, including those for shingles and pneumonia, if it proves successful this winter.
