It has been a difficult year.  Coping with Covid-19, and all the challenges that it has brought both personally and professionally has been difficult for everyone.  The first lockdown was hard, but the second lockdown in many ways feels harder, because we understand the scale of the challenge and what will be required to get through it.

This time round some of the fear from the first lockdown has gone, because we know what to expect.  But instead it has been replaced with a tiredness.  Without really having the time or opportunity to recover from the first time round we are having to do it all over again.

For general practice lockdown 1 and lockdown 2 feel significantly different.  When lockdown 1 happened the message was to stop everything to make sure that patients with coronavirus were looked after.  In lockdown 2 the message seems to be that general practice should be open for business as usual, and be absorbing the covid challenges on top of everything else.

Now the ask is for general practice to also take on the covid vaccination programme.

It easy to react from a position of tiredness.  How can we find the energy to take on all the logistical and operational challenges this brings, on top of everything else?  Especially when it feels like we are already running on empty?  I know I personally am guilty of reacting like this.

But the reason I (like many of you) chose healthcare as the industry that I wanted to work in, as opposed to investment banking or commercial law or anything else, was because I wanted to make a difference.  I wanted to not just earn a living, but to do so in way that a made a positive difference to others.

Playing a part in the covid vaccination programme is likely to be my opportunity to make the biggest difference maybe I will ever be able to make.  A vaccine is the only route by which we can re-gain our lives, our economy, our normality.  Without it, as we have seen, the pandemic takes over everything.

So yes it is hard, and it is difficult to summon up the energy and personal resources, but really it is a huge opportunity.  Undoubtedly general practice will rise to the challenge, and play a leading role in taking the country out of the crisis it finds itself in.  I want to be part of it.  I want to know that when it mattered most, I made a difference.