North-east MP welcomes British Army's involvement with coronavirus vaccine centres
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Banff and Buchan MP David Duguid has welcomed news that the British Army is setting up 80 new Covid-19 vaccine centres for NHS Scotland from this week.
It will be the biggest peacetime resilience operation ever undertaken by the UK Armed Forces.
Ninety-eight soldiers, mainly from the Leuchars-based Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, will be working with NHS Scotland over the next four weeks.
They will be organised into 11 vaccination centre set-up teams across the country. The work will include identifying sites, organising car parking and traffic flow systems, establishing patient recording methods and practices, facilitating vaccine delivery to the sites, preparing storage for medicines and equipment and conducing a smooth handover to NHS Scotland.
Mr Duguid said: “I am very pleased to see the British army being deployed to help with the vaccine roll-out north of the border.
“This will help to speed up the process of getting this vaccine into as many arms as possible – as quickly as possible.
“It is an enormous task, but the logistical skills of our armed forces honed in military and humanitarian operations all over the world will help our NHS to get this right.
“Over the coming weeks, new sites will be established all over Scotland, including here in the north-east, to work through the population and make sure everybody that needs to receive the vaccine can do so safely.
“We all want to get back to some sort of normality as soon as we can.
“We also have the huge task of rebuilding our economy in front of us. That will require both our governments to work together and support people and businesses up and down the country to get back on their feet.
"The successful roll-out of the vaccine is a vital first step in that process.”
