Senior Nurse: 'We must focus on rebuilding'

The Senior Nurse in charge of Covid-19 in the Belfast Trust says 'we must focus on rebuilding our health service.'

Joanna Hogg was the first person on the island of Ireland to get a Covid-19 vaccine back in December.

She also leads the team of vaccinators at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.

She spoke to us as part of our #meetthevaccinators campaign:

"Afterwards it was such an emotional thing, I could see in the reaction of all of the other people in the room what that meant to them.

"We all understood that this was the start of the fight against Covid-19 and we knew this was going to make a huge difference so the fact that it had started and everybody was starting to get that level of protection, you could see that relief in people coming through it was just incredible."

In total, over 1,980,708 total vaccines have been administered in Northern Ireland.

In recent days, vaccination sites have opened for the over 40s, whereas they only had access to jabs via community pharmacies before.

It is all part of the final push to get as many people vaccinated against Covid-19 as possible.

Joanna told Downtown Cool FM we must look to the future as the Health Minister published plans for cancer recovery services and elective care:

"People are unwell and what we need to do now as a health service is focus in the next few months and year on rebuilding and restructuring and starting to focus on what we can do to try and rectify this."