Health professionals have praised a Christchurch nurse who used social media to find people to receive COVID-19 vaccines after a clinic was oversupplied.
GP Peter Wilkinson told Stuff a nurse from his practice went to a vaccination clinic at Burwood Hospital on Sunday where they received their first dose of the vaccine.
The nurse was then told the clinic has been oversupplied with around 1000 vaccines and didn't have enough people to administer them to before their expiry date.
To stop the commodity from going to waste, the nurse took to social media to contact friends and family to receive the jabs.
Professor of Medicine at the University of Auckland Des Gorman told Newshub he believed the nurse did the right thing.
"Good on the nurse for having the initiative to go onto social media and making sure the doses weren't wasted," he said.
However, he said the oversupply of vaccines to the clinic was particularly worrisome, as they could have gone to people in urgent need.
"Quite frankly, to have misordered or misallocated that many, it demonstrates that the vaccine rollout and the vaccine management leaves much to be desired."
But University of Auckland professor Helen Petousis-Harris said problems are expected while New Zealand works to implement the vaccine rollout.
"[Mishaps] wouldn't surprise me," she said. "You are going to see these sorts of things happening until you iron out the issues in the system which allows things like this to happen."
She told Newshub New Zealand should look at how over countries have managed their COVID-19 vaccine response, and that many have had glitches along the way.
"All of these things are probably quite predictable but until you know what the kinks are and you allow them to happen that you can fix it."
There have been other reported issues with vaccines, including in Gisborne where only half of the vaccines allocated for local border workers and their family members were actually given to them.
Tairāwhiti DHB said 300 doses were assigned in the tier one roll out but only 86 border workers and 51 family members had one.
In a previous interview with The AM Show, Gorman slammed the rollout, saying a lack of staff capable of administering the vaccine is not an excuse for the lagging rollout.
"It's hard to reconcile that we're a year into a pandemic and we're having conversations like this," Gorman said.
"This is incompetence. You should never go for complex explanations when 'incompetence' will describe what you're seeing.
"This is a system that doesn't have an operational capacity and I believe we're also worried about the supply of the vaccine… with all due respect, get as many vaccines as you can to as many arms as you can, as fast as you can."
