PHARMACISTS, GPs and other immunisers will have to administer 200,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines every day, if the Federal Government's target of vaccinating all adult Australians by Oct is to be met, experts believe.
A paper released by the University of NSW's Centre of Big Data Research in Health, outlined a number of scenarios, based on an assumed start date of 01 Mar, that could see the entire adult population vaccinated by 25 Oct and potentially earlier, if immunisers can administer 200,000 doses a day.
However, the expert's modelling suggested it could take significantly longer if the daily rate is lower, with models assuming 80,000 doses a day are administered forecasting it would take until Jun 2022 to complete phase 2b of the Government's rollout plan.
The paper's authors estimated that if half of Australia's 5,800 community pharmacies were "willing and able" to participate in the program, and administered 35 doses a day seven days a week, the network would be able to deliver more than 100,000 vaccines a day.
They added that the 1,000 GPs who have been recruited to rollout the vaccines would each be required to administer 100 doses a day to meet the 200,000 target.
"Taking into account the necessary screening and record-keeping involved in addition to their usual workload, this may be quite a stretch for all but the largest practices and pharmacies," the authors said in a separate article in The Conversation.
"It seems clear that to deliver at the scale needed to meet Government targets won't be possible through GPs and pharmacies alone.
"What's needed are mass vaccination sites... in a dedicated centre, trained nurses could vaccinate at a rate of between 80 to 100 people per hour.
"A similar approach in the UK has seen conference centres, sports stadia, churches and mosques all co-opted as mass vaccination hubs to great effect."
Meanwhile, the Pharmacy Guild of Australia has welcomed the Therapeutic Goods Administration's decision to grant provisional approval for AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine (PD 16 Feb).
A Guild spokesperson described the move as "the next important step in the national rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination program".
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