COVID-19 Vaccination Rollout

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Leader of the Opposition) (15:42): Supplementary: in relation to the question asked, do the western suburbs of our city have a lower vaccination rate than the state and for the rest of the metro area? If that's the case, why is there no mass vaccination clinic in the western suburbs?

The PRESIDENT: The minister has the call, if he wishes to answer. I am not sure that that related to the answer, but the minister can answer, if he wishes.

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:43): I think it is important to appreciate that there are clinics, both AstraZeneca and Pfizer, at the Women's and Children's Hospital, which is accessible on transport routes from parts of the western suburbs. There are only three mass clinics in the metropolitan area. Obviously, we can't have a mass clinic in every region. Certainly, people in the western suburbs would be much closer to the Wayville clinic than, I think, most parts of metropolitan Adelaide would be to their closest vaccination clinic.

I would remind honourable members of the comments that the government made when we had the first notification of the additional Polish doses. Since then, we have had further notifications of additional doses sourced from Singapore, and now we have even more sourced out of the United Kingdom. What we said in the context of those additional doses is that it would give us the opportunity to start to roll out even more of the targeted outreach services.

Up until this point, much of the initiative has been at mass vaccination clinics and GPs expecting people to come to mass vaccination clinics and GPs. We've made it clear that we are going to utilise additional vaccines to bolster our efforts in terms of pop-up vaccination clinics and mobile vaccination units. Mobile vaccination units will be running out of the three mass vaccination clinics. A particular focus in terms of those outreach services is to reach out to areas which have lower vaccine rates. That will be a key focus in terms of mapping where those services are deployed.