Professor Mike Holmes, of York primary care provider Nimbuscare, says its jabs teams have been working on protecting residents against Covid for almost 90 weeks in often harsh conditions - and now they've got a super new vaccine with which to launch the autumn booster campaign.

 

Not many people realise that our Covid vaccination team have now been working every working day since December 2020.

That’s nearly 90 weeks, many of which have been 12 or 14 hour days, seven days a week, often opening until 10.30pm to make sure no vaccine is wasted.

We’ve worked in some of the harshest conditions – snow, rain, storms and more recently during the hottest temperatures we’ve seen for some time.

Our vaccination team has been nationally recognised and this includes our superb team of volunteers, without whom our programme wouldn’t have functioned. Nimbuscare is incredibly proud of our teams and their commitment.

So we’re pleased to announce that this week will see the start of our Autumn Covid booster programme.

We will be open Monday to Saturday 8.30am til 7.30pm as well as Sundays 8.30am til 2pm.

The new Covid vaccine has arrived at Askham Bar and we’re ready to start vaccinating our care home residents and staff, as well as health and care staff.

This week we’re expecting the NHS Covid National Booking System to open up so eligible people can start booking their booster appointments at our Askham Bar centre. Appointment slots for Covid booster jabs will be available so please book yours via nhs.uk.

We will also be receiving the flu vaccine at Askham Bar very soon and hope to begin both flu and covid vaccinations from 19 September, on behalf of some of our GP Practices.

Ideally we would like to offer both flu and covid vaccines at the same visit, but this might not always be possible due to availability.

A few patients will be invited to go to their GP practice, the majority in York will be invited by Nimbuscare. We will try our best to offer both jabs as we know people would prefer just one visit to the site.

So please look out for your flu jab invites – these will, in the main, come from Nimbuscare by text or letter. There will be a link to book your jab online.

At our Acomb Garth Community Care Centre we’ve seen the start of a few more services for local people.

An ultrasound scanning service has begun Monday to Friday for NHS patients. This is provided by trained ultra-sonographers from Yorkshire Health Solutions, supported by local NHS consultant radiologists.

This Wednesday will also see our first Dementia Wellbeing Café for people with dementia and their carers. 

This is a great activity-based group, led by a dementia support advisor and supported by volunteers.

It takes place in the community café at Acomb Garth Community Care Centre from 1.30 to 3.30 and is attended by City of York Council social care staff and other organisations.

To find out more about this event which is being run by Dementia Forward, please contact 03300 578592 or e mail info@dementiaforward.org.uk

We’ve just launched a new services section on our nimbuscare.co.uk website where you can search for a local service – we will be adding to this as we welcome new community services to York so please take a look.

You may be surprised to find something happening local that you didn’t know about.

This has all been made possible by GP Practices working together, at scale. By providing services centrally, through Nimbuscare, we’ve been able to start reinvesting into the community.

We will continue to do this, working collaboratively and delivering locally to improve the health and wellbeing of the people of York.