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NHS Highland's public health director says vaccine rollout faced 'some delays' in certain areas but overall the GP-led programme is working well


By Scott Maclennan

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Vaccinations for those over 80 have been well attended using both receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
Vaccinations for those over 80 have been well attended using both receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

NHS Highland bosses have faced another Holyrood grilling this time at the health and sport committee where they were questioned over the rollout of the Covid vaccines and long-term problems like financial stability and recruitment.

The picture was described as mostly positive when it came to the vital vaccination of the Highland population with around 18,000 done so far but director of public health at the board, Dr Tim Allison, did admit to some delays in deliveries to rural areas.

That is despite Covid outbreaks at three care homes – Kintyre House and Castle Gardens care homes in Invergordon and Fodderty Care Home – that saw 51 residents and an undisclosed number of staff infected with the virus.

Dr Allison outlined how the board was pursuing a GP-led strategy to vaccinations in a bid to reach the more remote and rural areas as comprehensively as possible saying: “Our progress has been good so far.

“NHS Highland operates a somewhat different process from most health boards in terms of immunisation in that we rely more on General Practice rather than centralised immunisation.

“What that means is that we are better able to serve the very wide geography around Highland and across Argyll and Bute with lower population density islands and more remote areas.

“The latest figures that we estimate for vaccinations are around 18,000 across the whole of NHS Highland so we reckon we have reached about a third of the over 80s, in two out of our three of our localities we have vaccinated or offered vaccination to all care homes staff and residents, we are well through the patient-facing staff.

“Some GPs have pretty well completed their vaccination of the over 80s while some other GPs are still getting the vaccine but we anticipate that we will have vaccinated all the initial cohort by the first week in February.

“So the progress has been variable across the area but overall we believe we are making good progress.

“In terms of getting the vaccine out to rural areas there have been some delays, we are using a mixed model of two vaccines in primary care in order to ensure that we maximise the speed and efficiency of vaccinations.

“So we are using both the Pfizer vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine in general practice. We are working with practices to minimise any delays in getting the vaccines to them to get the first phase by February 5 or 6.”

On the issue of the board’s finances, Professor Boyd Robertson pointed to the board exceeding the targeted savings of £28 million in 2019 and 2020, saying: “That quite remarkable performance quite outstipped that of any other health board in the country.

“So we are on track to achieve the financial turnaround that we need in order to be de-escalated from level four

“In the current year we were on track to deliver the current savings, which was around £24 million, and of course Covid intervened and there are cost consequentials due to that.”

Finance chief David Gardner said: “The point made by the auditor general was around a lack of confidence in our ability to reach financial balance by 2021 2022 but the context of that was 2018-2019 accounts.

“The changes that have been put in place at NHS Highland have been transformational, they really have, the systems we have in place have allowed us to identify cost savings and cost improvements across the whole system.

“We delivered around £28.4 million in savings and almost 70 per cent were recurrent – and that is quite unusual in the NHS in recent years where mostly boards make non-recurrent savings and that just accumulates the underlying deficit going forward.

“The questions round whether we will deliver financial break even in 2021-2022 is a very good one and one I can’t answer right now because until we unravel the impact of Covid or what services are going to look like I cannot say right now.”

Related: Third death reported after coronavirus outbreak affects three Ross-shire care homes


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