On Saturday, the Barren River District Health Department will hold H1N1 vaccine clinics in all eight of its counties.

We spoke with them about the hotline they set up just for the clinics.

There will be 55-hundred doses given out at Saturday's clinics.

For those with the health department, they say the hotline took a lot of work internally, but so far it has been a huge success.

"Our phones in the hotline center have been ringing off the hook, and we're really happy about that," said Crissy Rowland, Director of Health Information at the Barren River District Health Department.

The hotline did close as of ten Friday morning, so the health departments could prepare for Saturday's clinics.

"This has taken a huge load off of our local health departments because some of our smaller counties have just a few phone lines, so our communities that are needing to seek other services, they have been able to make an appointment by calling in and actually getting to talk to someone," said Rowland.

They say appointments filled up in Warren, Barren, and Edmonson counties, and while it was open to anyone, they did try to focus on the target groups.

"We did have a few people calling that were not in the target groups, and we asked them to consider waiting," said Rowland. "Some of them chose to and some did not, but we were happy to make them appointments."

As far as the seasonal flu, the Barren River District Health Department says they are out of vaccine at this time.

"With the evolvement of the H1N1, production of the seasonal flu vaccine has been decreased," said Teresa Casey, Nurse Program Director for the Communicable Diseases Team at the Barren River District Health Department. "We do expect to get more of the seasonal vaccine in. We don't know how large of an allotment, but we do expect allotments to come in through November."

They also expect more H1N1 vaccine, so they are preparing for more clinics like those being held Saturday.

"We anticipate, as long as we are having clinics in this nature that we will have a call center set up to make appointments because we are planning to do our clinics by appointment only," said Rowland.

Five counties did not fill every appointment, meaning only 55-hundred doses of the 68-hundred available will be given out.

The rest of the vaccine will be saved for the next clinic scheduled for November 23.