THE HSE HAS said it should be in a position to provide daily vaccine figures “in the next week or two”, as it came under pressure from TDs for more up-to-date numbers.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said earlier this month that the figures would be available on a daily basis on the Covid datahub from 25 January but this commitment has not been met. 

The HSE is currently providing updates on vaccinations twice a week and yesterday said that over 160,000 people had been vaccinated.

Speaking at an Oireachtas Health Committee briefing this morning, several TDs raised the importance of daily vaccination figures for public reassurance.

The HSE’s vaccination lead David Walsh said that he was aware daily figures are a matter “of great concern” and that “we are working towards that”.

He said that part of the reason for the delay is because the priority was to start vaccinating people as soon as possible and before the recording system was fully operational.

He added that some of the nursing homes where vaccination have been taking place “weren’t set up” to record vaccinations in the system.

“We’ve been working in quite a difficult environments across long-term care and hospital settings, which weren’t set up for the system, and we’re still trying to catch up with that element of it,” he said.

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The HSE’s CIO Fran Thompson also said that some nursing homes were not adequately set up for recording the vaccinations that had been taking place.

“There’s a wide number of sites right across the whole geography of Ireland and many of them have little or no infrastructure for us to actually utilise,” he said, adding that some of the data is held by nursing homes themselves and the HSE does not have direct access.

“We have the self-registration portal now working for healthcare staff. And we would hope in the next week or two to be in a position where we have the solution, the system, that it’s real time, or very close to being real time, and therefore be able to provide those figures to people on a daily basis.”