The city’s effort to provide residents with information on how and where to get limited flu vaccines is woefully inadequate and needs an overhaul, according to a report released yesterday by the public advocate.

Staff from the office of the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, phoned the city’s various hotlines and logged onto city-backed Web sites from October 19 through October 22 posing as the parent of an 18-month-old child or the child of a 70-year-old mother to see whether the information on vaccines provided was accurate and helpful.

“The results were quite disturbing,” Mrs. Gotbaum told reporters yesterday on the stairs of City Hall. When her staff called 311, the city information hotline, they were directed to the city’s various flu hotline numbers. “The flu hotline was either not answered or inaccurate information was given,” she said.

Flu hotline operators improperly instructed six investigators to take their infants to Department of Health walkin clinics, Mrs. Gotbaum said. In fact, those clinics did not offer pediatric flu shots.

Two callers were told to take their children to local senior centers to get a shot. Follow-up calls to the senior centers found that only senior citizens over age 65 were getting shots.

Mrs. Gotbaum wants the city to set up a central system to deal with the flu questions and to ensure that the information being provided to citizens is accurate.

The public advocate’s survey, by her own admission, is not highly scientific. Her staff made 33 phone calls over the four days as research for the report’s key finding. Still, she said the survey does show that the city’s system to deal with the flu vaccine problem isn’t working.

“It’s the city’s job to try to make sure the right people are getting the shots at the right time,” Council Speaker Gifford Miller said.

Mr. Miller called on the Bloomberg administration to push the federal government to import safe flu vaccines from other countries before the flu season begins in earnest.

“Canada has a sizable surplus,” Mr. Miller said. The speaker, who is seen as a likely challenger to the Republican mayor next year, is a Democrat, as is the public advocate.

The city Health Department, for its part, said it could not verify the findings of the public advocate’s flu shot information survey.

A Health Department spokeswoman did say it has been receiving an unprecedented number of calls – as many as 7,000 in a day – about flu vaccines ever since the Bush administration announced earlier this month that the supply of shots would be limited because of some problems at the plant of a British vaccine supplier.

“Instead of holding a Sunday press conference that uses questionable methodology to criticize local efforts to cope with a rapidly changing national public health crisis, the public would be better served if the advocate and speaker joined us and other health advocates to ask the federal government for an adequate supply of vaccine,” Sandra Mullin, the department’s communications director, said.