By: Maria Moore
Three Clinics Scheduled By Town’s Health District
The Farmington Valley Health District listed three H1N1 Vaccination Clinics on its website this morning, Friday, November 13. All three clinics are being held next week, as follows:
- Tuesday, November 17, 2009 from 3:00 until 7:00 p.m. at the Avon Volunteer Fire Department 25 Darling Drive, Avon;
- Thursday, November 19, 2009 from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. at the Eno Memorial Hall, 754 Hopmeadow Street, Simsbury;
- Saturday, November 21, 2009 from 9:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. at the Farmington Community Center, 321 New Britain Avenue, Unionville.
Residents must schedule an appointment for one of the clinics scheduled above ~ walk-ins will not be accepted. Please call the H1N1 Flu Vaccine Hotline at 860-269-6214 to schedule an appointment between 9:00 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. The number has been busy all day ~ keep trying!
There is a Flu Vaccine Consent Form which must be completed and signed prior to receiving a vaccine. Consent forms are site specific. Please click on the clinic you are scheduled for to download a copy of the correct form:
The Consent Forms are also available at all clinic sites.
The clinics are restricted to residents who live within the Farmington Valley Health District’s territory, which includes Avon, Barkhamsted, Canton, Colebrook, East Granby, Farmington, Granby, Hartland, New Hartford and Simsbury.
The clinics are also restricted to priority groups, please see a copy of the list of priority groups for the three clinics (below).
The list of priority groups for the three H1N1 clinics scheduled for November 17-November 21 by the Farmington Valley Health District.
Farmington Valley Health District’s H1N1 Clinics By Appointment Only, Torrington’s Appointments Not Required
The three clinics announced on the Farmington Valley Health District’s website require residents of the health district, including New Hartford residents, to schedule an appointment to attend one of the clinics. Our reporter has been calling the Farmington Valley Health District’s hotline number all day and, except for one call when the health district first opened this morning, the Hotline number to schedule appointments has been continuously busy.
In Torrington, however, the Saturday clinic at the Middle School, just over the New Hartford town line, does not require appointments for eligible residents to be vaccinated.
Our reporter called the Farmington Valley Health District this morning to ask why appointments were still required for the Farmington Valley Health District clinics, and also to ask whether the Health District would be scheduling a clinic in New Hartford to make it more accessible to town residents. Our reporter left a voice mail for Kerry Flaherty, the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator at the Health District, and as of 5:00 p.m. she has not received a response. Our reporter also emailed Jim Farkas, the town’s Emergency Management official to ask whether he had any input on the scheduling of the H1N1 clinics and where they are being held. We will update this report as soon as we receive any feedback from either Kerry or Jim. Our reporter also called state Senator Kevin Witkos’ office in Hartford this afternoon and she left a voice mail asking for Senator Witkos’ input on the scheduling of the H1N1 clinics in our district. Our reporter’s last call late this afternoon was to State Representative Annie Hornish whose assistant took down the information and promised to make some calls on the issue on Monday.
The process of accessing the H1N1 vaccine by New Hartford residents continues to be more difficult than that for some of our neighboring town which are part of the Torrington Area Health District; those towns including Harwinton, Torrington, and Winsted. Our town’s health district, the Farmington Valley Health District, was the only health district in the state that had not received a supply of the H1N1 vaccine when we first wrote about this issue; see our November 1 report Swine Flu Update: H1N1 Vaccine Available Around State, Except In New Hartford’s Health District. Our health district did not have any H1N1 clinics scheduled during this past week, the last clinic being on Saturday November 7. The three clinics scheduled for next week continue to be by appointment ~ a frustrating process of calling one Hotline number which was busy since shortly after the health district posted information on the clinics on its website this morning and continued to be busy until the busy signal was replaced by a recorded message at 4:00 p.m. instructing callers to call back Monday to schedule an appointment. This is an unacceptable situation for those residents who are eligible for the H1N1 vaccine and and who are effectively being denied access to it by the restrictions placed on the vaccine by our health district.
We will update this report when we receive input from the various officials we have contacted today.
