Health and frontline workers can turn up at any Covid-19 vaccination site for their jabs from Monday, a decision aimed at speeding up vaccination against the disease.

Only health and frontline workers are eligible for Covid shots in the current round of vaccination, which started on January 16.

Since the start of the drive, prospective recipients are getting text messages mentioning where and when they will get their jabs.

“For a week from Monday, health and frontline workers can turn up at any site for their Covid jabs. We will run the trial for a week to increase the speed of the Covid vaccination. Necessary instructions have been sent to officials concerned,” said an official of the health department.

“We want to see for a week how this works. The only criterion is that the recipients’ names must figure on the lists of health workers and frontline workers. Detailed lists have been sent to officials at the vaccination sites.”

Bengal has around six lakh health-care workers and five lakh frontline workers from various government departments, including police, panchayat, civic bodies and public works department.

As part of the trial, it has been decided that the vaccine recipients will have to mention their institutions or departments and districts so vaccinators can run a quick check through the lists. “Not more than 100 persons can be vaccinated at each site. And depending on the location of a site, a recipient will be given Covishield or Covaxin,” said an official.

The state health department has decided that 25 per cent of the vaccination centres will be earmarked for Covaxin. All Covaxin recipients will have to sign a consent form before being given the doses.

So far only those who have received a text message from CoWIN, an app created by the Centre for Covid-19 inoculation, about vaccination on a certain day would be eligible for a jab and that too at the site mentioned in the message.

But with the app continuing to throw challenges and text messages remaining elusive for many, the health department has decided to find an alternative.

“If the mechanism we have thought of to speed up vaccination works, a recipient from central Calcutta can get the jab at any centre in, say, north Calcutta,” an official said.

“Once a person has received the first dose, his or her name will be uploaded on the CoWIN app. It wouldn’t matter if that person was scheduled to get the jab at that site on that day. Collectively, the numbers will go up.