Canterbury is currently vaccinating Group 2 and Group 3
Patients in these groups will be contacted directly by Invitation text, letter, or phone call when it is their turn. We are asking them to wait until they are contacted, rather than attempt to make their own appointments. We expect to have contacted all patients in group 3 to offer an appointment by the end of July, some of those appointments will be booked ahead into August and September. If patients are requesting early vaccination for compassionate reasons, they can apply through the Ministry of Health process.
Pegasus, Waitaha, and Christchurch PHOs are able to identify a large majority of your group 2 and 3 patients using your PMS data.
They will do this by searching for age, ethnicity, previous influenza vaccination, and disease coding. The conditions searched for include the eligibility conditions for influenza vaccination, plus some codes for obesity, hypertension, and serious mental illness and addiction.
Secondary mental health, in conjunction with Pegasus, has done a large amount of work to identify people with serious mental illness and addiction, so has data which will be helpful to contact this group.
Disability is a difficult group to search for in PMS data, so we are suggesting that practices consider adding a code which will identify people with a disability for the purposes of contacting them for COVID vaccination.
- SNOMED = 21134002
- Read code = any code starting with 13VC
Attaching this code to the files of patients with a disability will be a manual task at the practice, but you may be aware of some people under 65 with a disability who will not be picked up with any of the other codes. It will also be a useful code to use for patients who approach you asking if their condition fits group 3.
Practices can support their high risk patients to access timely covid vaccination by ensuring that contact details, demographic information, and coding are as up to date as possible.
The CDHB is working with midwives to support their patients to access timely vaccination. CDHB is also working with a variety of disability support groups to identify and invite their clients, and with community providers to support invitation for older people who receive home based supports. This means that some people in group 3 will receive multiple opportunities to book from different sources. We recognize that this may cause some confusion, but feel this is outweighed by the advantages of offering a range of booking options and opportunities to this high risk group.
Many practices are keen to start vaccinating their own enrolled population. Plans to enable this are proceeding and will be outlined further in the planned webinar, but we ask that you continue to support the PHO to invite your enrolled patients to be vaccinated at the current clinics in the meantime, to ensure that we are able to offer early vaccination to the most vulnerable members of our community.