South Yorkshire GPs "frustrated" over Covid vaccine supply issues
Some are having to cancel clinics last minute
Some South Yorkshire GP surgeries are having to cancel vaccine clinics last minute because of problems getting hold of enough of the jabs.
A primary care rep tells us staff are having to spend hours rearranging appointments when they're told short notice they're not getting as much supply of the vaccine as they need.
Dr Dean Eggitt's the Chair of Doncaster's Local Medical Comittee, which represents GPs in the town.
He says it's incredibly frustrating for doctors and patients:
"We've been told: 'look there's some vaccines coming, please put on a clinic'. So we work very hard to organise patients to come into a clinic and then even a few hours later we'll get an email or phone call through to us saying: 'we're sorry that vaccine's no longer coming to you, can you rearrange that clinic please?'
"It really is literally on a day-to-day basis, we keep our eyes on our email inboxes daily to try and figure out what's going to happen next.
"I've no idea what the centralised problems are - I can only assume it's because of an international logistical problem in delivering a vaccine across the world. It's got to be hard of course.
"I haven't seen any signs yet that there's any better organisation centrally that's going to result in a strict dedicated plan of how this is going to work."
The government released regional figures yesterday showing Yorkshire and the North East has the second highest number of people vaccinated so far in England.
More than 443,000 jabs have been delivered in the region so far.
Ministers are aiming to get the top four vulnerable groups vaccinated by 15th February.
But given the supply problems, Dr Eggitt isn't sure if we'll reach that target or not:
"I can't stress enough the frustration of being told one minute 'please put on a vaccine clinic' and then a couple of hours later 'please cancel it, we've sent the vaccines elsewhere'. So honestly I have no idea whether we'll hit that target.
"It's really difficult to know whether, on a regional scale or a national scale, we're going to hit our target. I'm pretty sure there's the political will to hit that target and certainly there's a will on the ground to hit that target.
"But whether the vaccines will be with us in time to hit that target is anyone's guess."
The Prime Minister told MPs yesterday the government's supplied more vaccines per head than anywhere in the world and is doing "everything it can" to accelerate the supply of vaccines.
We've asked NHS England for a response.