24/7 vaccinations are a bad idea – what I saw last week with my nan shocked me

I went with my nan, who lives in the same household as me, to get her first dose of the Pfizer jab last week. What I saw shocked me – and made me certain that the calls for 24/7 vaccination are a bad idea. 

Our appointment was at 12.30pm on 8 January at St Charles’s Hospital in London. I had to scurry along the corridor, trying to find a seat for my nan in the waiting area – feeling exactly the way I used to feel as a child in the school playground, playing tag and trying to avoid being touched by anyone. But in this scenario, I wasn’t playing a game. This was reality – with impossibly high stakes.

I was lucky that, after 20 minutes, I finally managed to find my nan a chair. Many people had to stand, some of them with trembling legs. We were finally seen at 1.37pm.

Coronavirus news - live: Ireland has world’s highest infection rate and patients push for 24/7 vaccinations

Social distancing was impossible to do, as elderly people filled the corridors – many in wheelchairs. It felt a little like intruding on an OAP bingo session on a Saturday night, as everyone chatted about “not seeing Jim for a while”, and what they were having for their tea. It was scary to think that many of these people were at risk of accidentally catching Covid while waiting for the vaccine itself – simply because of a lack of seating and the human urge to socialise.

There were a few ushers, but nowhere near enough. An elderly man arrived on a mobility scooter and I watched him struggle to get out. He knelt on the floor, desperately trying to crawl to a vacant seat. No staff were around to help. Why would they be? It was clear that the staff at the hospital were overworked and couldn’t deal with the sheer numbers of people that had to be vaccinated. I got upset, debating whether I should help or not. In the end, I stood still for more than an hour, glued to the side of my nan’s chair so that I didn’t touch anyone passing me in the corridor.

An hour late, the 12.30 appointments were called forward, and my nan tried to run out of her seat into the line. I called her back – rushing seemed pointless when everything else was being done so slowly. Our temperatures were taken while we waited for an available vaccine hub, of which there were about 20 – nowhere near enough for the masses of people in the waiting area. Herein lies the problem: it is fine to demand 24/7 vaccinations and argue that they’re not happening at a quick enough pace, but is anyone thinking about the staff who are administering the vaccines? How will they cope with the backlog of patients at three or four in the morning? How long will the waiting times be, by then?

Our nurse was lovely, laughing and joking with my nan, but the staff are under tremendous pressure. Everyone who receives the vaccine has to wait for 15 minutes afterwards, to make sure there are no adverse reactions, and I watched as the nurses carried on patiently tending to the next patients. The stream of people never seemed to end. When we left the hospital, more just kept on arriving.

My nan moaned at having to spend an hour and a half in the hospital – but that’s nothing compared with those working there; hour after hour, day after day, night after night. It was only from getting a glimpse of the wards, stuffed to bursting, that I realised just how much truth there is behind the headlines that the NHS is at “breaking point”. You see glimpses on the news, but you don’t know what it’s really like until you’re inside it. Not only can hospitals clearly not cope with demand for the vaccine, but those waiting are at risk of contracting the very virus they’re there to avoid – and extending the queue to a 24-hour operation is only going to make that worse.