VANCOUVER -- After a lacklustre start that saw phone lines unable to handle the high volume of calls from people looking to book COVID-19 vaccine appointments, B.C.'s regional call centres are now running smoothly, health officials said Thursday.
The phone system's days are numbered, however, as the province moves to introduce an online booking platform on April 6.
Dr. Penny Ballem, the executive lead for B.C.'s vaccination rollout team, told reporters during a news conference that there are "virtually no wait times" on the province's vaccine-booking hotlines, which operate within each of B.C.'s regional health authorities.
She attributed the improved performance to the finer segmentation of the province's vaccine rollout, which now opens appointments to everyone born in a single year, rather than in five-year increments.
"We're scheduling even more people every day," Ballem said. "So, segmentation of the age groups seems pretty practical and simple … It's really about protecting our public from having to wait in long queues that are not necessary."
The regional phone lines will remain operational until April 6, at which point they will be replaced by the online system and a single, province-wide phone number.
Appointments booked through the call centres will be for dates up to April 18, and B.C. has been vaccinating about 20,000 people per day, Ballem said.
She called the transition to the online system "tricky," but said the benefits of the new platform will be "massive."
"This will allow us to track everyone," Ballem said. "It will provide an opportunity a few months down the road for the public to access their vaccine records and for physicians and pharmacists to actually make sure they are able to access those supplies when they are seeing patients."
But will it withstand an initial flood of visitors trying to book appointments, similar to the roughly 1.7 million calls the regional phone lines were bombarded with on their first day of operation?
Ballem said mechanisms will be in place to prevent the website from crashing, calling the system "very robust."
"I think we all experienced the call centre issues we had on the first day of our rollout, which is a very typical experience across our country and other jurisdictions around the world," Ballem said. "When you first open up your clinics to the general public, they're very enthusiastic, and that's good news. We want them to want to get vaccinated and to be getting in there to get an appointment, but it really challenges the technology of call centres and online registration."
