Professor Mike Holmes, who coordinates York's mass vaccination centre, says in this week's column it will start offering jabs for flu as well as Covid next week - but you'll need to wait for a text message from primary health care provider Nimbuscare if you want get them both done at once.

"The Covid and flu vaccination programmes are now well underway at our Askham Bar Community Care Centre. 

We have started sending text messages out in stages, inviting people for both their flu vaccinations and their Autumn Covid booster vaccinations. 

Communication will start this week and appointments will be offered from 3 October for these co-administered vaccination sessions. Where possible, depending on the stock of flu vaccines we have, people will be offered both their flu and covid vaccinations at one visit.

As always with healthcare, it’s not been straightforward. As people may know, York was chosen as not only a local vaccination centre, offering vaccines on behalf of GP Practices, it is also a regional Covid vaccination centre.

This means that people booking on the NHS national booking system may not be offered both vaccines. Where possible we will try to offer both, but this may not always be possible to please bear with us.

The text messages for the local service will come from Nimbuscare, on behalf of your GP practice and will invite you to come to Askham Bar Community Care Centre.

For any patients who have issues with the internet or are having trouble with our booking system, they should contact our helpdesk on nimbuscare.help.desk@nhs.net

The main message to local people who require both vaccines is please wait for your invite from Nimbuscare. We are sending out text messages in batches based on stock, so patients shouldn't worry if they have not yet received a text/letter.

I also want to stress that Askham Bar is not a walk-in centre at the moment This is because we want to both manage our resources and ensure you have the best possible experience when visiting our service particularly as the weather becomes inclement.

Also at Askham Bar Community Centre we’ve reopened our Children’s Treatment clinics (CAT Hub) for children under 12 years old with respiratory illness and fever. This service is available for babies and children from all our practices

The idea behind this is to provide a service for children, and their worried parents and carers, to ease the pressure on primary care and to reduce the number of children who attend A&E.

The clinic will be open on Thursdays and Fridays from 14:30- 20:30. To access the clinic, children should be referred by a healthcare professional.

This week we’ll be holding our annual MacMillan Coffee morning at out Acomb Garth Community Care Centre to raise money for cancer care. Please feel free to drop in from 11am until 1.30pm.

As a local healthcare provider, we listened with interest to the new health secretary’s announcements last week on her ‘plans for patients’. 

One of the first steps, she says, is to let everyone who needs one, get an appointment at a GP practice within two weeks and that patients with the most urgent needs should be seen within the same day. 

We welcome any targets and standards which will improve things for our patients, but this is a huge expectation, so we wait with interest for more details of how this will be done and the resources we will receive to make this happen. 

I’ve outlined quite clearly what we feel needs to be done to improve general practice and access for patients – we need more GPs and other healthcare professionals, more collaborative working, better digital resources and improved understanding of how General Practice adds value to the health and care system."