THE GP who coordinates York’s Covid mass vaccination centre says it has temporarily suspended ‘walk-ins’ because the site was getting ‘incredibly busy’ and so many patients were facing long waits.

Professor Mike Holmes has apologised in his weekly column in The Press to people who had been inconvenienced, saying: “We’re sorry if things haven’t gone as smoothly as we would have liked.”

He said that sometimes innovation meant taking risk and with that came learning. “Our Nimbuscare teams have listened to our communities this week and made adjustments to how we’ve run the vaccination centre,” he said.

“So on Saturday we had to put the message out that we can no longer accept walk-ins to the Askham Bar centre.

“For now we are only accepting pre-booked appointments and I’m pleased to say there are plenty available via the NHS national booking system at nhs.uk.”

He said weekends were always busy and he would encourage people to look at appointments early evening on week days, which were much quieter in general. He said the emphasis this week – and the reason why the site had suddenly got so busy- was booster jabs.

“The big drive to encourage people to get their booster vaccine was due to the rise in Covid cases. The vaccination programme continues to be the best way we can protect ourselves from becoming seriously ill.”

Prof Holmes said Nimbuscare had also been one of the first vaccination centres to start delivering the Covid vaccine to 12-15-year-olds.

“This service was so popular on Saturday that we quickly opened up an additional 400 appointments on top of the 2,000 slots already available over half term.”

He also revealed that, conscious of the increasing numbers of pregnant women being admitted to hospital with Covid, the vaccination teams had been holding pop up Covid vaccination clinics within the Ante Natal Clinics at York Hospital. "As far as we’re aware, this is one of the only clinics of its kind in the region,” he said. “In our first week we’ve vaccinated 32 pregnant women.”