Question reference: S6W-00218
- Asked by: Oliver Mundell, MSP for Dumfriesshire, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 25 May 2021
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Current status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 14 June 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government for what reason people in Dumfries and Galloway are being pre-booked by central teams for vaccination appointments that cannot be reached by public transport from their community, and which are an 80-mile round-trip from their homes.
Answer
NHS Scotland Health Boards use the delivery model which is most suitable for their local circumstances, whilst maintaining a Covid-19 safe environment.
The NHS Dumfries and Galloway system schedules its own appointments using a booking algorithm, which works as follows:
•First checks for GP practices as a vaccination location;
•Then checks for nearest vaccination centre using estimated time to drive to location ( via google maps ) to find the closest centre, there is no upper limit for travel time;
•Repeats step 2 until it finds a vaccination centre with available appointments.
A person would potentially be asked to travel a large distance if there is no capacity at nearby centres. This is managed by NHS Dumfries and Galloway.
Scottish Government officials were instructed to contact NHS Dumfries and Galloway to ascertain if more local vaccination sites can be opened and if more are needed.
NHS Dumfries and Galloway responded that it is monitoring and addressing this. There is re-booking capacity to reduce the risk of appointing patients to venues that would require significant journey times. And NHS D&G continues to review uptake and "did not attend" rates across the region to determine if it is seeing any localities where there is a need to increase our provision to increase uptake rates.