davidgillon | Astra-Zeneca'd

Had my first jab this afternoon at my GP's - though technically it was the other surgery that shares the building that was organising everything. Lots of volunteers about, the first one just taking your car number - because they have a number-plate scanning parking enforcement system and telling scores of people how to use the terminals to log in would be a pain - then one to give you a squirt of hand sanitizer (completely pointless in my case as I immediately put them back on my non-sanitized pushrims). The next one checked your name and fetched a pre-printed medical questionaire for you to fill in - name and address done, but they wanted an emergency contact number in case of issues and the clip-board was extremely flexible, it took me two tries to get a legible version, the other questions were basically do you currently have Covid and do you have anaphylaxis problems. The next person you saw was a nurse, one of three, who checked your responses, told you they'd want you to hang around for 5 minutes after the jab, and recommended that you didn't drive for 15 minutes, then sent you through to where they were doing the jab.

That was a big room - about twice the floorplan of my house - that I've never been in before, which had been divided off into a waiting area and a vaccinating area. In practice you were waiting less than a minute before another volunteer called you through and told you to take one of the seats spread out around the room, though in my case it went "Take a .... er, find yourself a space". And walking up an down was a nurse with a trolley with a bunch of ready needles: "Left arm okay? Right done." I hung around until I got the nod, picked up a card indicating when I'd been vaccinated and what batch from one final volunteer, then headed home.

I reckon they were doing about one person every couple of minutes, and actually had capacity for about twice that, maybe even three times - there were three nurses in the vaccination room, though I could only see two trolleys.

So I reckon there were at least six nurses, and around a dozen volunteers, which if you extend it across the country is a hell of a lot of people pushing it out.

The only problem I had was trying to juggle coat, jumper, clipboard and pen. It was difficult enough when stationary - I dropped the pen and of course it landed under the chair, but trying to juggle and roll was a nightmare!