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Written by a patient
2nd April 2015


I requested travel vaccine (typhoid) in rediness for travelling to China. I was absolutely flabbergasted and a little perturbed that they would not provide me with the vaccination necessary for safe travel. As I had not given them 4 weeks notice. A)I dont attend the GP's that often B)Was told to check the travel vaccination clinics on the rear of the form. Couldnt do that as I had handed the forms back into the surgery. I am aware that the vaccine should be ideally given 4 weeks before travel, but this was an urgent booking and I would be travelling before end of April. So now I have to find a travel clinic somewhere in the Essex county? without being able to attend the GP practice 200 yards if that from my home.

24th April 2015
Response from Freshwell Health Centre

Thanks very much for taking the time to feed back to us. We are sorry to hear that you have been disappointed by our service on this occasion. We can confirm that you were correctly advised that we do not offer an immediate or urgent travel vaccination service. We are happy to provide this service to anyone who gives us more than four weeks’ notice (though at least eight weeks would be preferable). The reason for this decision is patient safety: After a patient fills in a travel form, this is analysed and a full risk assessment is carried out. The patient is contacted and an initial consultation is arranged at a mutually convenient time. After that consultation the vaccinations are ordered & subsequently delivered to us as it is not feasible for us to keep them all in stock. The patient is then invited back to have the injections. Travel vaccinations in general are thought to take two weeks to become effective, so these should be given at least two weeks before departure. With less than four weeks’ notice, this gives us a very tight timescale which means that a patient may not get their vaccination soon enough. In addition to this, trying to squeeze all this in at short notice tends to impinge on our nurses’ urgent appointments availability that we try to reserve for people who are unwell. The advantage of going to a specialist travel clinic for urgent travel vaccinations is that they deal in sufficiently high volumes so that it is feasible for them to keep a good stock of travel vaccines. Therefore a patient would not have to incur the delay of waiting for vaccine delivery and a second appointment – everything can happen on the same day. We believe this is a safer option when timing is tight. We were sorry that you were advised to read information regarding other travel clinics on the form that you had already handed in – this must have been frustrating for you. In future we will ensure that all our staff advise patients that this information is readily available on the travel clinic section of our website. Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Due to patient confidentiality, we are unable to comment on your specific case in detail but should you wish to discuss things further with a member of our management team then they would be happy to meet with you.

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