London hospital may lose 1,000 employees who refuse to vaccinate – 09/01/2022 – World

Decree on compulsory vaccination against Covid for workers in the public health system in United kingdom, the NHS, has set off a red alert in several managers. With hospitals saturated with high infections, they fear losing a significant portion of their workforce with staff who do not accept vaccination.

The scale of the problem becomes clearer as the date approaches when the rule goes into effect – April 1. Only King’s College Hospital in LondonProfessor Cliff Kay, head of the hospital, said at Sunday morning interviewFrom the BBC, Sunday (9).

Kay said the hospital administration is working urgently to encourage staff to vaccinate themselves, to avoid losing staff at a time when the capital is seeing a spike in new cases due to Omicron variant, highly contagious. Of the 14,000 on-site workers, 10% had not yet completed their vaccination schedule.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government announced mandatory vaccinations for health workers in December. Sajid Javid, the health minister, said the move was justified because doctors and nurses had a responsibility to keep their patients safe and that he was giving 12 weeks so everyone could get two doses of the vaccination.

The rule also received the go-ahead from the British Parliament later that month, with a vote of 385 to 100 against it, but unions in the region soon began questioning it, which claimed fear of professional immigration it could spark.

It is expected that 90% of NHS staff have received their doses of the vaccine, but a large group of 103,000 workers have not. The government says there are hospitals where only 80% of workers have completed a course of vaccination.

The situation has become a critical point due to the marked cascade effect: As cases increase, more and more employees get sick and go away from work, putting the burden on hospitals.

The number of workers on leave from the NHS due to Covid rose by nearly 60% in the first week of January compared to the previous week, according to Nursing Times, and The government even recalled the armed forces, which sent 200 soldiers to help hospitals over the next three weeks..

The UK is one of the countries hardest hit by the unimicron and, since December, has recorded consecutive records of new cases. The moving average of infections this Saturday (8) was 176,000 – the record was recorded days ago, on Wednesday (5), with 182,000. The country has added 14.3 million cases of infection since the beginning of the epidemic.

The number of deaths, despite a slight increase in recent weeks, does not register the same increase as the number of infections – something confirmed by the progress of immunization, according to experts. still UK surpassed 150,000 death toll from Covid on SaturdayThus, it became the seventh country in the world to do so, after the United States, Brazil, India, Russia, Mexico and Peru.

When he visited Kings College Hospital last week, one of the attendees taunted Health Minister Sajid Javid. He asked the staff what they thought of the vaccine requirement, until a doctor broke expectations with the answer: “I didn’t get vaccinated and I don’t want to be vaccinated.”

The official said he refuses to receive the vaccination because he thinks he has natural immunity, because he is already infected with the Corona virus, and asked the secretary to reconsider the demand for the vaccine. Javed tries to ignore the comment and puts the question to the other people present who don’t respond. Then he simply says that he respects the opinion, but the government receives advice from the best experts in the field. The scenes were recorded by the channel Sky News.

The UK has more than 18,000 patients hospitalized with Covid, of whom 868 require mechanical ventilation, according to government data. To date, 82.9% of the population over 12 years of age has received two doses of the vaccine, and 61.7% have already taken the booster dose.