Outstanding contribution to COVID response awarded

Year 12 pupil, Jake has received a Chief Operating Officer Commendation for exceptional service to St John Ambulance, for his work on developing and delivering the vaccination training project.

Since October Jake has been working as part of the St. John Community Operations training team to develop the vaccination training program. The team have been committed to providing 30,000 volunteers for vaccination centres across the country.

To begin with, Jake had been part of the team delivering the training sessions. Every weekend across the country Jake was training hypercentres that have the capacity to train around 100 people each day, training around 2,400 people across the country each week.

Jake delivered Vaccination training in Birmingham, at Aston University, and in Derby, at Derby Conference Centre, training class sizes of between 30-35 each day.

Following this, Jake was deployed to the mass vaccination centres as a Vaccination Care Volunteer looking after people in the recovery area, and Patient Advocate welcoming people at the meet and greet.

Not content with this, Jake has also been working at the Royal Derby Hospital since just before Christmas, as a ward runner on one of the COVID positive respiratory wards. Jake explains, “My day to day varies, but my general jobs include taking samples to pathology, collecting medication from pharmacy, helping the hostess with meal times, and ensuring the wards have enough PPE. I’ve been lucky enough to be given the opportunity to shadow our Healthcare assistants, so once I’m 17 I can look at starting a new job as one.”

On New Year’s Eve Jake managed to get his first dose of the Pfizer vaccine!

I was doing a late shift at the hospital, and they rang the ward to tell us they’d got some left over vaccines and wondered if any of our staff wanted it, and I jumped at the idea! I had no side effects apart from a bit of a heavy arm for a few days after. I’ve now also had my second dose so am fully vaccinated.

Jake’s passion for helping people has spread through DGS, with his EPQ project being to teach all eligible pupils and staff CPR. His final practical sessions were completed in Activities Week.

We are exceptionally proud of Jake and his fantastic work, he thoroughly deserves this amazing award. Well done Jake!