Mandatory Covid jabs for care staff scrapped
Rules requiring care staff to have received their Covid jabs as a condition of employment will be dropped.
Mandatory Covid jabs for care workers in England will be scrapped later this month, the government has confirmed.
Health secretary Sajid Javid announced staff will no longer be required by law to get vaccinated. The rules were introduced for care home staff in November, and had been due to come into force for frontline NHS and wider social care staff in regulated settings from 1 April.
It was met with warnings from across the sector, with operators saying it would worsen an existing recruitment crisis.
Earlier this year, the health secretary said he believed it was "no longer proportionate" to require vaccination as a condition of employment. A public consultation on the issue was launched last month, with 90% of responses suppoorting the removal of the legal requirement.
The consultation received more than 90,000 responses from across the health and social care sector, as well as from members of the public, Javid told MPs.
He has now confirmed the regulations will be revoked and rules will end on 15 March.
Questions remain, though, over whether staff who left the sector will now return. In December, thinktank The Nuffield Trust analysed government data and found the number of staff reported by social care providers fell by roughly 42,000 from April to October.
Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, says the change has come too late to repair the damage done to the care sector.
“Staff have already left residential care services and found new jobs in the NHS and home care,” he told the Guardian. “I seriously doubt we are going to see lots of them coming back.”
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