An Elephant and Castle pharmacist who worked seven days a week for months to give people the Covid-19 vaccine said his staff had to deal with abuse from “a minority group of patients” who wanted their jabs early.
Atul Patel, who runs the St George’s pharmacy on St George’s Road, was doing about 5,500 shots a month with his team at the busiest period over Christmas last year, and was awarded the Liberty of Southwark recently for his efforts.
Mr Patel, born in Uganda and raised in Peckham from the age of five, said he took on such a huge workload because he “couldn’t say no” when his community needed him. Southwark NHS said the northern part of the borough was a priority area for handing out Covid vaccines.
He and his wife started delivering vaccines in March 2021, thinking they would be giving out jabs three days a week. But soon demand was so high that they were vaccinating 500 people a week and working every day. “As soon as we were on the map we were inundated,” Atul said. The longest queue was about two hours.
They gave out vaccines through the NHS booking website and also gave them out to people walking in. “Some people aren’t computer literate, some people don’t have a computer. We wanted to make it work for everyone.”
The next challenge was in August, when the vaccine was opened up to a cohort of younger adults, Atul said. “All of a sudden we had people fainting, we had to put people on the floor. We had to lay them down on reclining chairs that convert to beds to help them recover.
“People were anxious when they came in, and they started feeling dizzy. We had a makeshift solution where we had folding sunbeds, we kicked the legs of the chairs down when people started to feel faint and they were gone.”
Atul and his team were still working as a normal pharmacy too, giving people the medicine they needed, often for serious medical conditions.
“Sometimes you’d be in at 2, 3, 4 in the morning, that took its toll eventually… I was getting exhausted and you could see this in my tired eyes but I knew that we had to keep going and get people vaccinated considering the increasing rate of infections and deaths we experienced in the UK.”
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Sadly Atul and staff also got some abuse, from a small minority of people who did not understand or agree with the waiting time between jabs.
“There was shouting and some people swearing. There was one particular character who was pretty aggressive and loud, they were saying ‘I’ve got a partner who has HIV and you’re putting him at risk’. I felt kind of rattled. I have to say they were minority issues though.”
Atul said although he felt exhausted, he would do it all over again.
“I remember Christmas time when we were thinking about doing Christmas. My wife said ‘no no no we want a Christmas break’ but she eventually agreed. When you do the things you realise the community comes together. Particularly when you call SOS. That’s that community spirit.”
Atul worked with St George’s councillor Maria Linforth-Hall to work out who needed a home visit to get their vaccine. Liberal Democrat Cllr Linforth-Hall nominated him for the Liberty of Southwark.
She said: “I am delighted that a local hero like [Atul] Patel received this prestigious award. The covid pandemic has been a period of immense suffering, but we are lucky to have had people like Atul rise up to support our community.”