Delaying NHS jab mandate ‘will not prevent job losses’

DELAYING mandatory Covid vaccines for NHS staff would fail to stop “several thousand” people losing their jobs, a health service leader has said.

All front-line healthcare workers in England will need to be double jabbed by April 1 in order to keep their job, meaning the cut-off date for a first dose is early February.

NHS staff will need to have two doses of the vaccine and official NHS figures show that around 85,000 staff have not had any, with a further 40,000 just getting one dose. Bosses will dismiss unvaccinated staff who cannot be redeployed to a non-patient-facing role.

“A delay gives a little bit more time [to get through winter pressures],” Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers and deputy CEO of the NHS Confederation, said. “But the bottom line is we could give people another four weeks and we’d still be in a position where several thousand people will lose their jobs on the front line.

“I suspect there are lots of people who believe the NHS and Government won’t go through with this; that the Government doesn’t want to lose a single nurse or a single doctor. But the value of the vaccine far outweighs the loss of a few thousand people.”

It comes as Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales, said he “would not rule out” recruiting unvaccinated NHS staff who had lost their jobs in England.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4, he said it would be done on a case-by-case basis and reiterated that Wales would not make vaccines mandatory for NHS staff.

Yesterday, Dominic Raab, the Deputy Prime Minister, urged healthcare workers to get vaccinated. “The deadline is there to protect the most vulnerable in our hospitals but we have got the resilience because we have got nearly 5,000 more doctors, nearly 11,000 more nurses than we did in 2020,” he said on the BBC’S Sunday Morning programme.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that the Government is toying with “kicking the can down the road” with the mandate, and considering adding a booster requirement before April 1, effectively pushing the deadline back six months. However, Mr Mortimer believes April’s deadline will be enforced.

A spokesman for the Department for Health said the plans were not in flux.