Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes NHS Trust serves a population of around 970,000 people across Bedfordshire and the surrounding areas from its main hospitals and through outreach services.
With the youngest average population in the entire UK, and proportionally the most children in education, this region has a significant requirement for vaccinations for all childhood illnesses and the annual prevention of the spike in influenza.
We work closely with the trust – from their Immunisation Clinic in Kempston – helping to maximise the efficient delivery and collection for a number of dedicated programmes aimed specifically at schools.
The immunisation drugs are collected daily from purpose-built cold stores, then delivered in temperature-controlled vehicles following a carefully structured timetable so that the individual doses of vaccinations arrive at the schools before 9 am. This ensures they reach the schools in perfect condition for the Community Vaccination Team to administer to the pupils.
To assist the outreach team, we work to an efficient routing plan for over 400 schools in the area, calculating the optimum requirement for daily deliveries and collections, and the number of drivers required to service the routes.
During September to December each year, our drivers ensure over 50,000 Flu vaccinations are delivered safely to the schools for the community nurses to administer to students. This also includes any relevant consent forms that are monitored for collection and returned to the central administration team.
Then, between December and April, the team deliver and collect HPV vaccinations and consent forms for authorisation, in the same way, utilising the same vehicles and drivers, taking advantage of their local knowledge to evolve the routing.
This logistics project of the NHS Trust offers an optimised and cost-efficient model, mainly due to the fantastic coordination and cooperation between our team and the School Nursing Team.
