Professor Mike Holmes, who coordinates York's Covid vaccination centre at Askham Bar, says it's very much still open for business - and has started giving jabs to young children.

 

Here at Nimbuscare and across the city we’re now very much focusing on recovery and moving forward.

We’re determined to build a new, more positive future and have lots of plans in place to help people get better, whether from Covid or any other illness which has been affected by the pandemic.

It’s vital that we focus on catching up and we’re working with partner organisations to offer a number of ways to help individual patients, as well as the wider NHS, recover from the impact of Covid-19.

So, how are we doing this?

•We’ve already been offering patients at higher risk from Covid-19, such as older people, people with health conditions and pregnant women, the opportunity to monitor their oxygen levels at home using oximeters.

•From this month we’ll be helping York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust ensure patients with Long Covid can access the NHS resources that they need to recover by contacting them at regular intervals and offering support.

•We’re working with City of York Council and York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to develop a support system for people who are on hospital waiting lists. This means checking their blood pressure, carrying out blood tests and doing all we can to make sure they’re well enough to have their operation when the time comes.

•We’re also providing medical care to patients at Peppermill Court in York, a 12-bed, step-down unit for people with Covid-19 who are discharged from hospital, but not well enough to go home. This unit was set up by City of York Council in partnership with York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and is a residential unit for people who are well enough to be discharged from hospital but still require care.

•Our Children’s Treatment Hub for children up to 11 years of age is helping to take the pressure off the hospital by treating children with a range of symptoms in our special clinics.

These are just some of the additional services which Nimbuscare is supporting on behalf of York’s 11 GP practices as part of York’s recovery plan. Many more possibilities are under discussion.

It’s clear that the NHS is working as hard as ever, despite the extra work of delivering over 14 million vaccinations during December - New figures just out show that NHS staff delivered 120,000 more diagnostic tests and checks during December, compared with the same time last year.

This is despite us facing the highest number of staff absences for any winter on record. Over December and January the NHS had almost 5.8 million staff sick days – more than a third (38%) of these due to COVID

I also want to remind people that our York Vaccination Centre is still very much open for business. We’re still open seven days a week from 8.30am til 7.30pm. Millions of reminders to grab a booster jab are being sent out this week by the NHS. You can still book in for your first, second, third or booster jab via nhs.uk.

You’ll get to visit our brand new temporary modular building which recently arrived, so we promise you it will be a bit warmer if nothing else!

And we vaccinated our youngest patients this week as we opened our doors to our high risk five to 11-year-old cohort. I want to say a special thank you to the teams who put these clinics in place. We wanted to make sure our young people and their parents and carers were made as comfortable as possible during the vaccination process. The feedback from the clinics has been very positive and our new selfie photo booths proved particularly popular with this age group!