General Chat

Can this be right?

Saw this on late news before I headed for bed and was a bit taken aback as I did not think it was good practice -

The focus was on vaccinating children and the filming was done in a huge hall - it could have been a school hall or not - but we saw children being jabbed.

One lady was filling the syringes and placing the filled ones into am open container. There looked to be six or seven filled syringes - needles uncapped - in the container when another person came along and took one - obviously intending to vaccinate a child.

Surely this can't be good practice to have filled syringes lying open to the air to be collected as and when required? I remember the two people who vaccinated me (one doctor and one pharmacist at the doc's surgery) both filled syringes in my presence then immediately vaccinated me.

It is too late for me to ring anyone I know whose medical knowledge is much superior to mine so I thought I'd put it on here for comments in the morning as I was perturbed to say the least.

All the syringes were already loaded when we had our vaccinations to speed up times. The needle end still had it's cover on.

I always pre-loaded a syringe before the patient came in but left the needle cover on, some people have phobias about syringes so the less they see the better.

You see, Pat, I know it was late but I don’t remember that the needles were covered - perhaps someone else saw this news items - Bob mentioned another late news item so perhaps his recall is better than mine?

It was late at night so I've just watched that segment again on catch-up and it is difficult to see whether the person filling all of the syringes and placing them in one tray has capped the needles or not but I hope she has.

Do you remember the old school vaccinations where I’m sure they never even changed the needles. Or was that some horrible story my older brothers used to put about.

When we had our two jabs the syringes were already filled and in a tray (presumably to speed up the process) and thinking about it now I don't recall the needle having a cover on the end. It was our own GP who gave us the jab but at a local health centre as his surgery is very small in a semi-detached house.

Kath. x

Back in the late eighties I used to assist in the school vaccination programmes. I'm pretty sure that two needles were used, one, a 'drawing-up' needle, was used to fill the syringe and this was then replaced with another shorter, finer, needle for the actual jab

Given the numbers receiving the jab, sufficient syringes were filled prior to the commencement of administering the vaccine to ensure that there was no delay and no need to fill and jab, as it were.