Hospitals have been instructed to prepare a list of frontline healthcare workers on standby for vaccination in case there are leftover doses.

It comes after the Rotunda Hospital became the second in Dublin to admit giving the vaccine to people not included on the national priority list.

The Coombe Hospital earlier confirmed it had given leftover doses to family members of hospital staff.

On The Hard Shoulder this evening, the Minister of State for Public Procurement, Ossian Smyth said hospitals have since been instructed to have a list of staff members on standby in case extra doses become available.

“The vaccines themselves are so valuable, they have been so hard to obtain and we are so happy to have them so we don’t want to waste a single dose,” he said.

“Once you constitute them; once the vaccinators take them out of the vials and mix them up with saline, they have got a short window; they have got six hours to dispense with them – after that they go in the bin.

“So, to avoid that, the CCO wrote to the hospitals and gave them a new protocol that describes how they should prepare a reserve list of frontline workers for anyone who is left at the end.”

Mass vaccination centres

He said leftover doses will not be a problem when larger portions of the population are being inoculated at mass vaccination centres.

“The answer to having leftover doses at the end of a round of vaccinations is that, when the vaccinations are happening at mass vaccination centres and there is a queue out the door, if somebody does not show up for their vaccination slot, there will always be somebody in the queue behind,” he said.

“We are trying to get to a position where we are vaccinating one million people per month and to get to that level, that is going to absolutely require mass vaccination centres, exactly the same as the mass testing centres that were set up in the stadia.”

Priority groups

Minister Smyth said the mass centres will come into their own once the top three priority groups – nursing home staff and residents, frontline healthcare workers and people over the age of 70 – are vaccinated.

“It is from that point onwards that we are having very large groups of people signing up to be vaccinated,” he said.

“It is not a case of your doctor writing to you. It will be a case of there being an ad in the newspaper or something in the news saying, everybody aged 55 to 59 can now go online and register for their vaccine and choose their nearest centre.

“You will get a ticket number and you will show up with your ID to get vaccinated.”

Online booking

He said it organising a vaccine appointment will be as easy as booking tickets online.

“Once we get to the broader sections of society based on age groups, we can reasonably say that those people can self-register in the same way you would go online to get a cinema ticket or to get a flight,” he said.

“People are familiar with that process – you go on you book and so on. There will be alternative for people who are not able to do that, who need assisted digital and who need somebody else to book it for them – which can be done over the phone.”

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