Question reference: S6W-00912
- Asked by: Paul Sweeney, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 18 June 2021
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Current status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 29 June 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government, further to the answer to question S6W-00395 by Humza Yousaf on 18 June 2021, whether it will increase the intentionally limited capacity of the Citizen Portal vaccine booking system, in light of recent Public Health Scotland data indicating that 500,000 vaccine appointments have been missed since February 2021.
Answer
The online vaccine booking portal closed on 11 June.
The online portal was part of the Scottish Government’s measures to widen the accessibility of vaccine appointments, and was extended for another week, on top of the original three week window. 40% of the young people aged 18-29 who were still to be vaccinated, self-registered on our online portal.
Those who did not register online, are being scheduled for an appointment on the system, and letters are coming out over this week and next. However, to give advanced sight of appointments online, we are launching an appointment checker on NHS Inform to help people view their pending appointments. This will help those people, like students, who may have moved away from their registered GP term time address. This will also help them view their offered appointment earlier and chose to reschedule to fit with their work and life.
The National Vaccination Scheduling System (NVSS) has successfully appointed millions of Scottish citizens while achieving exceptionally high uptake rates this demonstrates a massive success for a system built from scratch in the space of 8 weeks.
Our intention has always been to evolve and continually enhance the NVSS. As the programme has engaged with younger cohorts it has become evident a digital first online booking approach would be beneficial. The programme team are in the process of designing an online booking system for the autumn/winter Flu vaccinations.