Friday 5: 03 September 2021

Kia ora koutou,

Join us in celebrating the week that was, in this week’s special edition of the Friday 6 (we simply had too many good stories to share!)

1. The programme has been seeing some huge volumes and last week Auckland Metro saw 10,048 of Maori vaccinated and Pacific Peoples vaccinated 18,330. A big shout out to all the partner, providers and teams driving and equity approach for the vaccination programme and helping to reach these amazing milestones last week!

2. Unichem Pakuranga organised an off-site clinic at Takanini Sikh Temple as a first trial on Tuesday, 31 August. They vaccinated around 220 Sikhs in 4 hours, from 10am to 2pm. And, they will be doing a re-run this Saturday evening with similar numbers. It’s a great effort from one of our primary care partners, who have been working closely with their local ethnic communities. There are now 100 GP clinics and 32 community pharmacies in the Metro Auckland region providing COVID-19 vaccinations and the numbers are growing daily. Well done to Daniel Tsai and Leanne Kirton for all their hard work bringing them on-board.

3. Northland’s Event Centre has adapted quicky to move to the Drive through model and is now vaccinating almost 4,000 people a week! Below is a model of their drive through centre where clients drive into the building to receive their vaccination and then move forward to the observation area. Once their 15mins observation time is up the clients exit the building. As of the 29th August Northland has administered 117,545 vaccination, well done to the Northland Team!

4. The Pacific Covid-19 Vaccination Centre Otara hit their 50,000 doses administered milestone on 26th August, the team has been working to vaccinate our Pacific Whanau in the community. Congratulations to the Team!

5. The Papakura Marae went live on the Monday 30th August and has been quickly ramping up to hit almost 300 vaccinations per day. Well done to the team on another drive-through going live!

6. The programme continues to have its biggest days and yesterday 2nd September we administered 30,472 doses in a day. To provide an idea of how quickly the programme is now moving it took 11 weeks to reach the first 100,000 doses administered milestone in Auckland Metro and the next 100,000 took only 4 weeks. Last week alone the programme delivered 159,000 doses! The first 500,000 doses took us 21 weeks and the second 500,000 doses we achieved in a third of the time only taking 7 weeks. Ka pai te mahi!

And finally, some wonderful feedback from some clients who had been recently vaccinated at the Tamaki Vaccination Centre:

Thank you so much to Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei for your care of our family at the Glen Innes Vaccination Centre today. Everybody at the centre was friendly, efficient and very kind, even though they would have been on their feet in PPE dealing with people all day. It was also evident how much work had gone into organising the premises, carparking, signage, furniture, vaccination centre teams, medicines, PPE, IT systems…even music and TV while we waited our turn. Our younger daughter was in tears with worry about the needle and everyone who helped us, from the security team to the administrators, attendants and nurses, couldn’t have been more patient and thoughtful (and our daughter happily decided to go for a short run an hour after arriving home). Would it be possible to pass our thanks to the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei team at the Vaccination Centre?

With such selflessness, capability and, clearly, wise leadership we are in a good place.

Have a good weekend everyone.

Ngā mihi,

The Vaxx Programme