This week, Monash Health’s South East Public Health Unit and partner organisations reached the milestone of administering over one million COVID-19 vaccinations to our community in the south-east catchment.
Sandown Vaccination Centre has played a significant role in achieving this goal and at this week’s employee forum we were joined by Nurse Manager Gabrielle Bunton who reflected on her experience with the clinic to date.
“It’s been fantastic here – we’ve had a lot of positive feedback which is great.”
“When we hit our first milestone of 3,000 vaccinations in one day, that was a month or two ago. Now, obtaining 1 million vaccinations for SEPHU, I can’t believe we’ve reached that in such a short period of time”
“On weekends when we’re fully booked, we’re seeing 4,500 plus patients a day. We have 90 cubicles operating on weekends and 60 during the week.”
As the age group for vaccine eligibility widened, Gabrielle said the clinic noticed an increase in the number of people presenting with needle phobias. To combat this, she explained that they started offering the use of virtual reality (VR) headsets as a method of distraction.
“We have VR headsets that are being used more and more every day because we’ve found that among the population of younger people that are coming through, more have needle phobias.”
“Our normal go-to is people wiggling their toes or tapping their arms when we are giving the vaccine – this gives us another option to tap into that younger generation that is already used to VR headsets. It’s certainly helped them reduce their anxiety and given them a bit of a distraction method. It’s been a really positive experience.”
You can watch the full employee forum here.
Approved by David Bloxham.