County hospital staff could get vaccination ‘as early as next week’

» HOSPITAL staff in Gloucestershire could start being vaccinated from coronavirus ‘as early as next week’, the boss of the county’s two main hospitals said yesterday.

Deborah Lee said she is ‘confident’ that NHS staff within Gloucestershire’s hospitals will get the covid vaccine ‘sometime this month, maybe as early as next week’.

Speaking in a webchat on Gloucestershirelive’s Facebook page, the local health chief said if the vaccine were delivered ‘this afternoon, we would be able to roll with it tomorrow’.

The first doses are already on their way to the UK, with 800,000 due before this weekend as part of the first 20million ordered.

Ms Lee said those jabs will be handed out to hospitals across the UK although she said she does not know whether county’s hospitals will receive it first, but added: “If it is not Gloucestershire next week then it will be the week after.”

Ms Lee, who is the chief executive of the NHS trust which runs Gloucestershire Royal and Cheltenham General hospitals, said: “Gloucestershire hospitals is the lead organisation for Gloucestershire in terms of delivering the vaccine.

“We will be working really closely with particularly GPS, practice nurses and in and around what we call primary care.

“The vast majority of people who get the vaccine will get it through a series of delivery units, if I can call it that. They are everything from a building to a pod where someone will be able to come along and receive their vaccine. By late-spring everyone who wants to have the vaccine will have had the opportunity to do so.

“This is not going to happen overnight but I am confident that sometime this month, maybe as early as next week, we will be starting to deliver the vaccine to our workforce.”