The state government thinks the first phase of Covid-19 vaccination will last several months and is drawing up plans such as deploying doctors and nurses for the inoculation drive in rotation so hospital services do not suffer.

The 19 Covid-19 vaccination sites in Calcutta are either in hospitals (government-run as well as private) or ward health clinics of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC).

Primary, secondary and tertiary care as well as routine immunisation is provided by most of these institutions.

The state health department has decided that Covid-19 vaccines will be administered on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday every week.

Hospital administrators said it meant that some of their nurses and doctors would be away from hospital services on four days a week. The hospitals have planned to deploy doctors and nurses at the vaccination sites in rotation so that the disruption, if any, to the other services offered by them is minimal.

“Administering the Covid-19 vaccine to all healthcare workers and frontline workers could take about six months. It will also depend on how quickly we get the adequate number of vaccine doses. But a rough estimate suggests that it could take about six months to complete the first phase of vaccination,” said a health department official.

According to Covid-19 vaccination guidelines issued by the Centre, one crore healthcare workers and two crore frontline workers in the country will be vaccinated in the first phase. State health department sources said around six lakh healthcare workers in the state had been registered for the vaccination. The list of frontline workers in the state is still being prepared.

An official of a private hospital in south Calcutta said they would train more employees in administering Covid-19 vaccine doses so that they have a bigger pool of trained personnel to run the vaccination sites.

“We have planned to train multiple batches of doctors and nurses who can run vaccination sites. We can use the batches in rotation. This will ensure that no single doctor or nurse remains stuck at the vaccination site always. That will enable them to discharge their other responsibilities,” said Rupak Barua, the group CEO of AMRI Hospitals.

Sisir Naskar, the superintendent of MR Bangur Superspeciality Hospital, said that four doctors of the hospital were present at the vaccination site on the campus on Saturday to deal with any emergency situation.

“There was one medical officer, one gynaecologist and two general medicine practitioners. We had kept the four-member team at the site to ensure that recipients got immediate medical attention if any of them had shown any adverse reaction after receiving the jab,” said Naskar.

He added the number of doctors at the vaccination site may be reduced after a week or so. Several doctors have said they will get to know more about adverse events following immunisation after one or two weeks.

“The Covid-19 vaccines are little known to us. We have to be very careful for the first few days. But a week or fortnight later, we will have more knowledge about after-effects of the vaccine,” said the doctor.

Naskar said the hospital could keep only one doctor at the vaccination site and ask others to go back to hospital duty after around two weeks.

CMC officials said they were planning to change the vaccination sites in regular intervals for two reasons — to take the sites closer to recipients and to not burden one site with vaccination workload for many days.

Five ward health clinics of the CMC have been chosen as Covid-19 vaccination sites. All five are located in different boroughs. There are 16 boroughs in the Calcutta municipal area.

A senior CMC official said they were mulling to shut down the current vaccination sites after the healthcare workers in the five boroughs got their first shots of the vaccine.

“We will pick five new sites in five other boroughs. This will help reduce the burden on the existing sites and help them concentrate more on other routine jobs. Shifting the vaccination sites will also help healthcare workers in other boroughs as the new sites will be closer to their home or workplace,” said a senior official.