Question reference: S5W-35162
- Asked by: Donald Cameron, MSP for Highlands and Islands, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 11 February 2021
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Current status: Answered by Mairi Gougeon on 17 March 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government on how many occasions the COVID-19 Vaccination Helpline has been unable to reschedule appointments due to faults with the booking system, and over which dates these faults occurred.
Answer
There have not been incidences of faults with the booking system.
There are times when there may not be many appointments to choose from and on one occasion NHS Lanarkshire had assumed that same day appointments could be offered, which was not supported by the system at the time. The only time appointments can’t be re-scheduled is when there is no available capacity at the vaccination clinics. The system works on having available appointment slots which are set up by Health Boards. A slot can be booked numerous times if the clinic has several vaccinators working at the same time.
We have seen several occasions where all slots are full with appointments and we then work with Health Boards to support them in opening other clinics or adding additional vaccinators to create more capacity. We do not allow overbooking.
For the weekly period of 1 March to 7 March there were a total of 63,764 calls 173 of which were abandoned. This equates to 99.72% of calls being answered.
We have also trained an additional 600 staff, of which 320 are on shift at some point each day.
Wait times are being monitored, The average call wait time for the period 1 March to 7 of Match were 6 seconds for the rebooking line and 1 second for the priority/general enquiry line.