Matt Hancock clears way for retired doctors to administer Covid vaccine
Health secretary Matt Hancock has demanded that red tape keeping retired doctors from administering the Covid vaccine is slashed.
Former doctors who have offered to administer the Covid vaccine have been forced to jump through a series of regulatory hoops and need to provide 21 different pieces of evidence to have their applications approved.
Boris Johnson told the BBC today that the red tape forced on these ex-doctors should be slashed.
The Sunday Telegraph reports that Hancock has asked for the process to be streamlined to ensure the UK has enough people to provide a wide rollout of the newly approved AstraZeneca/Oxford University vaccine.
The rollout of the Covid vaccine, the second to be approved in the UK, begins tomorrow and the government is aiming to immunise 2m people a week.
A senior government source told the Telegraph: “Everyone has a role to play in getting our country through this pandemic, and we want people to support the vaccine delivery plan.
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“Matt wants to cut the red tape and make sure the process is as easy as possible. He has made clear it is not acceptable to have unnecessary bureaucracy getting in the way of people wanting to help.”
Former Royal College of General Practitioners chair Dame Clare Gerada told the BBC on Thursday that the whole conutry could be vaccinated by the spring if the government runs a 24/7 vaccination programme.
“If we can scale this up, if we can get a mass operational system up and running then I don’t see why we can’t get the whole population immunised by the spring,” she said.
“But we can’t just rely on GP surgeries to be calling people in. It’s got to be football stadia, all these large venues we’ve got currently lying dormant.”