‘Unacceptable’ how Surrey hospital trust found out about vaccine u-turn
A Surrey hospital trust director has said it is “unacceptable” they found out the Government had backtracked on its mandatory covid jab policy via the media.
Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Foundation Trust is relieved at the government U-turn after weeks of working hard to minimise a serious risk to the NHS, at a time of such high demand and staff sickness levels.
It was reported on Monday that health secretary Sajid Javid was considering scrapping the requirement for patient facing healthcare workers, which he confirmed in the House of Commons on Monday.
Louise McKenzie, director of workforce transformation at Ashford and St Peter’s, said she is “pleased that the risk around future workforce supply is not going to be affected”.
She said they will continue their push to educate staff of the importance of having the vaccine, but will now not be terminating any contracts.
She was not impressed at how the news reached them, she told the trust’s board meeting today (February 3).
“Fairly unacceptable the way we found out – after all of that work that we put in – but it was revealed via the media that the government was planning to do a review,” she said.
“We’re still waiting for that to go through the parliamentary process, but we have been instructed by NHS Improvement to not instigate the process that we would have been putting in place which was a process of termination of contracts, issue of notice from tomorrow onwards.
“We were updating the people committee on Friday on the work we’d done to reduce the number of unknown records from 1,500 at one point down to less than 100, so that we were in a better position to identify where those risks might be.
“It’s now not the risk that we though it was on Friday.”
Today was the last possible day for people to have their first dose in order to get the second in time for the deadline.
Board chairman Andy Field added: “You’re right to highlight that it’s not the right way to find out about it, I think we all feel that.
“We are still seeking to persuade colleagues that haven’t had the vaccine to have it.
“It comes back to our patients and keeping them safe.”
Sajid Javid told MPs the government is launching a consultation on whether to end the mandate as he believes it is “no longer proportionate” to require the vaccination as a condition of the job.
Last Thursday South East Coast Ambulance Service reported that after a long drive with just one week to go, they still had 122 potentially unjabbed ambulance staff, with 40 known to be unvaccinated and 82 unknown.
As many as 77,000 NHS staff nationally could still be unvaccinated.