MP urges Boris to speed up admin process with vaccine
BURTON MP Kate Griffiths has called on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to consider speeding up the Covid vaccine process.
Miss Griffiths wants to see a change to the consent process in order to reduce the administrative burden on health workers.
Currently, individual consent by a healthcare clinician takes 10 to 15 minutes per person vaccinated. In a virtual session of Parliament, Ms Griffiths revealed that in practice that would mean 41,000 hours to consent and vaccinate the top four priority groups for the vaccine in East Staffordshire alone.
Ms Griffiths, who recently volunteered at the vaccination centre at the Pirelli Stadium in Burton, saw the rollout process firsthand and how hard clinicians were working to protect vulnerable groups with their first dose of the vaccine.
She suggested to the PM a national consent model to help speed up the process, freeing up clinicians and allowing them to spend more time actually administering the vaccine to more people. In response to her question, the Prime Minister said the Government was looking into everything possible to ensure that the rollout was as “smooth and easy as possible” and urged “everyone who is offered a vaccine to take it up as soon as possible”.
Ms Griffiths said: “I recently visited the Pirelli Stadium to see the local rollout of the vaccine. Dr David Atherton, chair of the local Primary Care Network, and his team are doing a phenomenal job at rolling out the programme locally and helping to protect vulnerable people in our area.
“It is important we do all we can to make their role as easy as possible which is why I have urged the Prime Minister to consider a change to streamline administrative processes, enabling more people to be vaccinated sooner and help us all get back to normal more quickly.”
The MP’S call comes after the news that the UK has so far vaccinated 1.5 million people as it races to inoculate 14 million people by mid-february.