Missed Vaccinations - Letter

Dear Parents and Carers,

We would like to update you about additional community school aged children Immunisation clinics that are running throughout the summer.

We were asked by Public Health England to stop the school aged vaccination programme in both Schools and Community Clinics on the 24th March 2020 due to Covid restrictions and lockdown.

The impact of this was that a high number of school based clinics were cancelled and therefore a  large cohort of eligible young people were not vaccinated in line, with the routine schedule for childhood immunisations  across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

In early June we were asked to start to look at how we would ensure children and young people who had missed their routine vaccinations would be brought up to date.

We are living and working in extraordinary times and we have liaised with Public Health England throughout to ensure we were offering vaccination sessions in a way which was safe for children, young people and our staff given restrictions on use of estate including schools.

We began by providing the community clinics in Kingswood Hub and Pill Clinic in the first instance and we are rolling it out further over the coming weeks; since we first wrote to you we have opened additional clinics in:

·         Cossham Hospital, Patchway Hub,and Amelia Nutt Clinic in Bristol.

·         Drove Road in Weston

We are continuing to assess and review further venues across the geographies. We need to ensure we are using locations which  ensure we are able to keep everyone safe with easy to control access, easy access to PPE , vaccinations are stored in both settings and there is easy car parking as well as Public Transport access.

I appreciate it does mean some travelling but we are not bringing together people in a mass gathering as it is really important we are coordinating our offer with an appointment system adhering to social distancing, use of face coverings and one way systems will be in place.

We would welcome you to contact us at one of the telephone numbers below to book into a clinic we, have a number of dates and times throughout the summer we can offer you, and further clinic venues are being opened.

For Kingswood Hub, Cossham Hospital, Patchway Hub and Amelia Nutt clinics:

Please call: Tel 01454 868387

For Pill Clinic and Drove Road (Weston-Super-Mare) – please call: Tel 01275 373104

We are experiencing a high volume of calls, if you are unable to directly talk to one of our Team please; leave a message as your call is important to us. We will be in contact with you as soon as possible to book your child into an appointment.

Kind regards

Sirona Immunisation Team