Vaccination

Great Dixter, July 2020

What a week it's been.

There was a massive low point, just after I wrote the last blog post. I felt terrible, everything was awful, I very nearly walked out of work but had the sense to talk to Lola II before doing anything foolish. I'm glad to say that my brain chemistry has reset itself and I'm feeling much better, thank you for asking. My Tuesday Buddhists saw the worst of it, and they and Lola II have rallied round like troopers to make sure that I'm OK. With chocolate, in Lola II's case.

I got vaccinated. I'm not over 80 or in a care home or in the NHS front line, but I am a healthcare professional and became eligible together with every clinician in the Trust. This Trust was where the first patient in the UK was vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine, and the 'SODA' (Surgery on Day of Admission) ward has been converted to a vaccination centre, with another in a Portakabin out in the car park. We aren't running on the scale of those mass vaccination hubs in a sports stadium that you read about, but we're working towards a target of 850 vaccinations a day.

How do I know this number? Because I volunteered to support the vaccination programme within the Trust without knowing exactly what that would entail. After doing the online learning I heard nothing, and they are understandably a bit stretched in that department, so I managed to find out that I needed to attend a training session in person, and was I a Registrant or a Non-Registrant? These are new terms to me, but it turns out that I am a Registrant because being a Dietitian requires you to be registered with a professional body - the Health and Care Professions Council, which also regulates 14 other professions including paramedics, hearing aid dispensers and prosthetists.

So with my newly discovered Registrant status I turned up for the training, which is when I discovered that I might actually be the one behind the mask wielding the hypodermic and approaching your deltoid muscle (another new word for my vocabulary). You might be lucky enough to get the paramedic, which I for one would be happy with. Not sure about the hearing aid dispenser.

A slightly-too-crowded room full of masked-up nurses with a few imposters like myself were shown the whole of the job role, which starts with administering the screening questionnaire to check for pregnancy, bleeding disorders and other eligibility criteria. Then there's the preparation of the vaccine itself, which has to be reconstituted with saline very carefully to avoid damaging it, then drawn up into syringes for administration. 

A number of steps within the protocol caused the nurses in the room to make the noise that plumbers make when they have had enough of working for you, because we are required to - wait for it - re-sheath a needle after poking it through the vial bung, and then stick the same needle, not a new one, into the mark's arm. Apparently this has been outlawed for long enough to provoke horrified glances among the nursing Registrants. Of course, I'm happy to learn bad habits without a second thought.

The actual sticking-the-needle-into-the-deltoid practice was done using a pad clipped to the arm of my practice partner. It's quite a long needle, and my only question throughout the whole process was to ask how deep you stick it in? The answer is that you have to judge for yourself based on how fat the arm is. Not really what I was hoping for. My practice partner was a bit taken aback when I said 'ow' as she stuck the needle into the pad, but she soon saw the joke.

Now my paperwork goes through some sort of process which will lead to me being able to use some e-rostering system to book a shift, where I will be supervised doing the job. And then, presumably, let loose on the punters. You can be sure I will keep you up to date on progress.