A Waterford GP says many practices around the country have been 'let down' by the HSE, as questions over the vaccine supply continues.
The aim of 100 thousand doses last week was missed by the HSE and it will miss it's vaccine target for the second week in a row.
The shortfall is being put down to issues with the supply of the AstraZeneca doses.
It's as the Taoiseach says it will be 'very challenging' for the country to meet its Covid-19 vaccination target for the end of March.
Micheál Martin's aim is for 1.25 million doses to be administered by that point.
So far, less than 461,000 have been given out, and last week's target was missed by over 18,000.
"I know from a lot of colleagues around the country, they've been left down by deliveries not arriving, arriving on the wrong day when they've got large clinics scheduled, alongside their normal day-to-day work where they've had huge issues in having to reschedule them" said Waterford based GP Sinéad Fitzpatrick, from Fitzpatrick Medical Centre in Ballybricken.
"Thankfully I can speak for most GPs in Waterford where their deliveries have arrived this week Our vaccines came on a Monday, we were ready to go and we vaccinated on Tuesday morning and got all of our over 85s done.
"It's been disappointing to see HSE people quoted in the media saying that we're not vaccinating at weekends and putting that forward as a reason as to why vaccine numbers are not as high as we should be.
💉 Vaccine data - Wednesday 3 March
14,008 doses done on Wednesday.
Total doses completed 474,645
🔹 1st doses 328,598 (+12,542)
🔹 2nd doses 146,047 (+1,466)
▶️ Pfizer 386,490
▶️ AstraZeneca 76,566
▶️ Moderna 11,589#COVID19ireland @VirginMediaNews https://t.co/TW93Ih2kZy— Richard Chambers (@newschambers) March 6, 2021
"It's extremely unfair to say that - we have got four days from the day of delivery to use these vaccines. So my experience in Waterford is that as soon as these vaccines land in the fridge, they're into the patients' arm in 24 hours."
Fitzpatrick says inefficiencies and inflexibility within the HSE have caused further unnecessary delays, with doctors being left without vaccines.
"An issue we would have had is that we have quite a young practice, so we didn't have a huge amount of over 85s.
"We put a huge amount of work in setting up our clinic the other day, we had to go to a larger practice to vaccinate and we buddied up with them - we moved our staff up there, we set the whole thing up and we got one vile with six vaccines in it and we were done quite quickly.
"All the work that went into that; if we had been given 20 or 30 vaccines we would have gotten through a huge amount of work in a couple of hours up there and a lot more people would have been vaccinated."
And the Waterford GP says her staff have been on the frontline not just in administering vaccines, but also taking calls from frustrated patients, with a lack of information from the Health Service Executive creating further confusion.
"We've got some very angry patients that have been calling. I have two admin staff who are amazing, and they have to take some not very nice phone calls from people who are directing their frustrations at us.
"The second part then is the difficulty of trying to run a regular GP service when the phone lines are constantly being caught up with people wanting to know about lists. And then there's people trying to get through for their regular GP stuff, and we're having to field all the other calls because the communication from the HSE is not clear, and it's not honest with the patients.
"I think what we would like as doctors and healthcare professionals is that they at least just be honest with us and say look there is a shortage of supply, there's an issue with the delivery process, the ordering is too cumbersome - at least just be honest with us."
You can hear the full interview with Sinéad Fitzpatrick below:
