Covid-19 Vaccinations

An important message from Well Up North, your Primary Care Network (PCN)

Well Up North is a collaboration of 12 GP Practices in North Northumberland - Well Close, Union Brae & Norham, Cheviot, Glendale, Belford, Alnwick, Rothbury, Widdrington, Coquet, Felton, Gas House Lane and Greystoke.

The practices within Well Up North wanted to share this information so you know we are involved in the vaccine programme.

Having been asked to nominate a single hub site from which to deliver a mass vaccination programme within our network area, we have successfully negotiated three. The details are now being worked through and we will share more information when we can.

Our priority is to vaccinate our patients as safely and efficiently as possible, whilst keeping our workforce and GP Services operational and safe too. We predict we will be asked to give the vaccine at short notice with strict rules about who comes first. We will need a lot of community support to bring patients to our hubs to receive their vaccine.

We will do our best for you, but we ask that you please do not call your practice to book a Covid vaccination yet. We will contact you as soon as we are able to offer your cohort (as decided by NHS England) the vaccine, with details of how to book an appointment.

This work may affect our clinical teams' ability to sustain a full level of day-to-day services. It could lead to delays or cancellations to clinics. There may be times where patients need to wait longer to speak to us - whether that's us answering the phone, getting your prescription ready, or arranging a telephone call or face to face appointment with the practice team. However, guided by our Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and NHS England, we will do our best to ensure there is as little impact as possible to our normal service.

To minimise any disruption, we are proactively collating a database of GPs, Nurses, and other Allied Health Professionals who may be able to help us administer vaccines too - Do you think you could help? Please email Sophie.wrightson@nhs.net to register your interest.

North Northumberland General Practice collaborative working arrangements

We have been working hard with our primary care network to ensure that whatever challenges we may face in the coming months we can continue to provide you, our patients, continued access to essential healthcare from your local practice. Although testing for healthcare workers is now available and will reduce the number of staff who are isolating when a household member has symptoms there remains the risk of healthcare workers being too unwell to attend work if they contract the virus. We are concerned there is a risk that this may mean some practices are left without GPs available to care for their patients for short periods of time.

Therefore in order to ensure that our patients always have access to a General Practitioner we have taken the temporary step of activating access for every GP across the North of Northumberland in each of our practices. Although we have made this access available immediately this will only be used when a GP is working to support a practice and only to access the records of those patients who need their input. This may include but is not limited to consultations (telephone or face to face), issuing medications and reviewing test results.

If you have any concerns or wish to discuss this further please speak to our practice manager.