Clinics and pharmacies across Canberra are geared up to vaccinate children as young as five years old from today.
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Doctors say demand for jabs for the under-12s has been overwhelming - but with supply far short of meeting that demand.
Doctors have advice for parents. "Everybody wants their child vaccinated this week before school starts," Dr Mel Deery says, "but with an eight-week interval between doses, that won't be possible."
But surgeries and pharmacies are ramping up vaccination services to deliver the children's doses which are one-third of the size of an adult dose.
GPs plan special child-friendly arrangements to try to ease anxieties.
Belconnen Mall Medical Centre was planning balloons and children's channels on TV to help ease anxiety. "We can't have toys and books because they are hard to sanitise," practice manager Michelle Froome said.
The medical centre received its 100 doses on Friday and will holding a special vaccination clinic for children aged five to 11 on Saturday, January 15 and again on February 5 if it receives its allocated the vaccines.
"If I could have 300 doses, we could have done 300 children," said Ms Froome, so high has the demand been.
When adults are vaccinated there, they are done in groups of five or six. The group gets the jab and then sits together for a short period before being allowed home.
With this youngest group, they plan to reduce the groups to just two children being vaccinated to make the experience less forbidding.
They also plan to allocate more time to each young patient, also recognising parents may be stressed.
There is good advice for parents, according to Dr Mel Deery, a GP at YourGP surgeries in Denman, Crace and Lyneham.
Firstly, try to make sure the child is wearing something which gives complete access to the top of the arm - an 11-year-old struggling against taking a jacket off makes it harder for everyone.
Dr Deery recommended a T-shirt or singlet.
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Secondly, she said getting it over quickly was the best way of minimising anxiety. The jab is small and painless. It is barely noticeable.
"The real trauma is often the anxiety before," Dr Deery said.
"If your child is anxious, it would be helpful if parents held him or her in their lap.
"If you've got a particularly anxious child, it would be helpful if both parents came."
She also said demand had been overwhelming. Her clinics had been allocated 200 doses per fortnight for children (compared with 1100 per week for adults). Some clinics had been allocated less for children.
"We are not getting enough doses," she said.
If they had more, they could vaccinate more.
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