Everyone in Shetland who is eligible to have vaccines this winter should now have been contacted. With six weeks of the main programme to go, we have vaccinated 34% of the 10,600 adults and 35% of the 3,700 children invited for flu vaccination and 42% of the 3,400 people invited for Covid vaccination.
Residents in care homes and people who are usually visited at home by the Community Nursing Team will be offered their vaccines over the next few weeks. There will be local clinics in Bressay, Foula, Fetlar, Skerries and Fair Isle for the residents of those islands during November. For these groups, if you receive a letter inviting you to an appointment at the Grantfield Vaccination Centre, this has probably been generated by the national system in error. Please ignore this and/or contact the vaccination team for advice.
If you have missed your appointment, you can still have your vaccines; please contact us and we will arrange another appointment for you, or you can drop in to Grantfield Vaccination Centre. We would like to vaccinate as many people as possible before the Christmas holidays, when the levels of flu and Covid in the community are expected to increase.
You can check if you are eligible for a Covid and/or flu vaccine this winter using this link Winter vaccines | NHS inform If you think you are eligible and you have not heard from us, then please contact shet.vaccination-team@nhs.scot or 01595 743319. If you think that an eligible family member or friend has not heard from us then please let us know so that we can check. For those registered with the Hillswick, Unst, Yell and Whalsay practices, please contact your own practice.
As in previous years, school pupils are being offered flu vaccination at school, and appointments for pre-school children will be at their local GP practice. There has also been an option for some children to have their vaccines at nursery, as we are piloting this at a couple of venues. All pregnant women will be offered the flu vaccine through maternity services.
For further information on flu vaccination, including further details on which vaccines are offered to which groups of people and leaflets in a variety of languages and formats (including BSL and Easy Read), please visit the NHS Inform website: Flu vaccine | NHS inform
There is similar information on Covid vaccination here: The coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine | NHS inform