Around 20% of home care staff ‘could leave if Covid jabs become mandatory’

Around 20% of home care staff ‘could leave if Covid jabs become mandatory’. The government have launched a new consultation which is expected to take six weeks.

The consultation will decide if vaccination becomes a mandatory condition of deployment for frontline staff in both health and more social care arenas. The government already made the decision that for registered care homes in England, staff will need to be fully inoculated by November 11. This is unless of course they are exempt.

The UK Home Care Association believes that the government should work on persuading workers to get vaccinated rather than making it compulsory.

The organisation commented that: “Our concern is that vaccination as a condition of deployment will likely result in a substantial loss of the workforce, potentially at least 20 per cent.

“Right now, we are experiencing the most extreme challenges in recruitment and retention in history, at a time of rising demand for home care.

“We feel it’s very important to balance the mitigated risk of infection with the risk of unavailability of care at home for highly dependent older and disabled people.”

In other COVID news, Spain supplies New Zealand with 250,000 extra vaccine doses in a bid to fight the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, has confirmed that an additional 250,000 doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine are heading to New Zealand from Spain.

According to the Prime Minister the vaccines left Spain’s Madrid at around 1 AM New Zealand time. These are additional doses of the vaccine to those that have already been scheduled. This is just one of two deals that have been put in place and the second deal will be even larger.

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