All patients of the Rycote Practice aged 70 or over have received a Covid vaccination or been invited to an appointment this week. Please contact the practice if you are aware of anyone over 70 who has not yet received a first dose of the vaccine so that we can arrange this. We are aware that many patients have been invited to larger vaccination sites in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire – we apologise if we have contacted patients who were already booked into one of these sites. Unfortunately we are not privy to invitations that have been sent by NHS England. Current Government policy is to make certain that everyone in Cohorts 1-4 (ages 70 and above) is vaccinated across the country before we move on to offering vaccines to people in cohort 5 (ages 65-69), and at the current time we are seeking urgent clarification whether we can, locally, start to offer any spare vaccines we have to people in this cohort. We are fully committed to rolling out the vaccination programme as quickly as possible.
The Covid vaccination clinics at Unity Health have been very successful.
We have now invited all our top four cohorts to be vaccinated – these are the following groups:
- All over 80’s
- Health and social care staff who are registered with us (although the responsibility for this is mainly with their employer)
- All over 70’s
- Patients of any age who are clinically extremely vulnerable (‘shielding’ patients)
There are some patients in these groups that we have not been able to contact – if you are aware of anyone in these groups who has not been vaccinated please do let us know since we don’t want to miss anyone.
The following are the % vaccinated in each group:
Over 80’s: 96%
Health and social care: 90%
Over 70’s: 92%
Clinically extremely vulnerable: 87%
In the middle of January, there was a national call for practices who were doing well with their vaccination programme to offer help to other areas in vaccinating their care home residents since there were significant concerns that these groups were very susceptible particularly to the new more transmissible variant. Through the hard work of our GPs, particularly at the weekends, we also vaccinated over 500 care home residents and staff in other care homes outside our area. We have also vaccinated staff and some over 80’s at our vaccination site from other practices who were finding it difficult to vaccinate this very vulnerable group.
From 8 February we will continue to target anyone in the top four cohorts who has not yet attended and will start to invite patients from cohort 5 (aged 65-70). Where we have a mobile number, you will receive a text to follow a link to book your own appointment. If there are no appointments left, your link will continue to be ‘active’ and can be used to book on future clinics as they are scheduled. If you don’t have a smartphone you can forward the whole message for someone else to book on your behalf or put the link into your internet browser to book. If you don’t have a mobile we will call you to book an appointment. Clinics are usually scheduled at quite short notice, in line with our vaccine deliveries (at the moment we have less than a week’s notice of these).
Please continue to wear a mask, practice good hand hygiene and observe social distancing after you have been vaccinated to help drive infection rates down whilst we vaccinate younger patients. Stay safe. Protect the NHS. Save Lives.
