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I had my Covid and Flu jabs the other day.

The lady in the pharmacy said; I was 'very brave'…

… she has a way with old geezers.

I'm eternally grateful to have free jabs. Thank you NHS. Particularly, as I’m still living in the shadow of the after effects of radiotherapy, that ousted my cancer squatter.

Thank you, thank you.  

However, I’m an economically inactive, has-been but the great people working in the front-line of healthcare, this year, unlike me, will not be getting a free covid jab.

The NHS will tell its own people; they’ll have to buy their booster-jab this year.

Yes, really… frontline staff! The people who keep the show on the road, will have to queue at the pharmacy, behind the old geezers… credit card in hand… to protect themselves, their patients and...

... the service that employs them. 

It’s the sort of policy you’d expect from a numpty who’s never managed a rota, never seen an infection control log and never had to staff a ward… when half the team’s gone sick.

The numbers tell the story.  

Staff sickness absence hovers around 5–6%. That’s ~50% higher than before the pandemic. Mental health remains the top cause but respiratory bugs, including Covid, still knock-out tens of thousands of staff every winter. 

One nurse, off-sick, means a clinic delayed; two off-sick means an operation cancelled... you get the picture.

At a time when every pair of hands counts, the government has decided not to protect the workforce that keeps the NHS functioning.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, (aka the Joint Committee on Vacuous Ignorance), has ruled that only the elderly, the immunosuppressed and care-home residents will get the Covid booster free. 

Everyone else… including NHS staff, can go private.

You might save a few quid on vaccines, but you’ll lose it on agency bills and cancelled lists. 

A day’s absence costs far more than a dose of vaccine. A single outbreak on a ward can wipe-out a week’s worth of elective work. The maths isn’t hard… and…

… it’s not just theory.

We’ve known for years that vaccinating healthcare workers pays-back. During flu seasons, vaccinated staff are off-sick less often, spread fewer infections and keep services running. 

The same logic applies to Covid. A vaccinated workforce is a resilient workforce. A coughing, spluttering one, isn’t.

The official line is that the ‘marginal benefit’ of vaccinating younger, healthier adults is small.

Maybe… but this isn’t just about the staff.  It’s about their patients, the vulnerable, the frail, the immunosuppressed and the unlucky. 

The NHS exists to protect them…you can’t do that if your workforce is passing infection around.

It’s also a matter of respect. After some recent brutal years, NHS staff deserve more than a pat on the back and a bill for their own jab. 

Infection control isn’t a lifestyle choice…it’s a professional duty. Employers have a moral and occupational responsibility to protect their workers and their patients. 

That’s not politics, it’s common-sense.

In the end, this isn’t about money or medicine. It’s about leadership. You don’t run a health service on applause and austerity. 

You run it by keeping the people in it, healthy.

The NHS is our biggest employer and in many respects it’s our worst. Now it’s in danger of becoming a case-study in false economy.

A free jab for staff isn’t generosity it’s self-preservation.

I’d guess the estimated wholesale-cost of Covid vaccines, for all frontline NHS staff is around £14 million. 

(⇒ 919,682 FL staff x £15, estimated cost of vaccine) = ~£13.8 million

Compare this with sickness absence… 

⊢ an average daily cost of £400 per staff member, including salary, benefits and overheads.

Daily cost of sickness absence: for a 5.7% absence rate is ~£56 million.

Annual cost of sickness absence: extrapolating the daily figure over a year: the total annual becomes ~ £20.4bn.

The cost of vaccinating frontline staff is approximately 0.07% of the annual expenditure. 

Compared with agency staff expenditure… the vaccination cost is about 0.4% of the annual expenditure.

The business of the NHS is health creation...

... not running a casino... taking bets on the future. Infections always do damage. We know that. This year will be no different.

If the NHS won’t protect its own, who will?

I’m amazed the RCN, the BMA, the Confed’, Providers, the Unions aren’t raising hell about this…

… if they don’t…

… cancel your subscriptions...

... use the money to buy yer own jab.

EXCLUSIVE PODCAST

Sir Jim Mackey

Chief Executive NHS England

In conversation with

Niall Dickson & Roy Lilley

In their latest In The Loop podcast Niall and Roy have a revealing exchange with NHS England Chief Executive Sir Jim Mackey.

In a wide ranging discussion Jim admits just how challenging it will be to meet the government’s ambitions for the NHS.

If they deliver, he thinks books will be written about it and that it could be the greatest public sector turnaround of all time. 

“We are trying to do a lot in one go, we are trying to do major change on pretty much every front, very quickly and what feels like in a rush, and at times it feels a bit overwhelming.”  

But he remains optimistic and argues that they have no alternative but to address a whole series of fundamental challenges.  

Sir Jim makes clear he did not know NHS England was going to be abolished when he took on the role.

He supports the plan but says it would have been reasonable to assume that when the announcement of job losses was announced everything about the redundancy programme would have been ‘boxed off’ and ‘lined up’.

But it wasn’t.

And, he says; matters have become more complicated as the year’s gone on and as other things have changed politically and economically.  

He insists that redundancies at NHS England and for staff at Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) should be achieved through voluntary deals...

... but admits they are still negotiating with the Treasury and that it has taken too long, with lots of argument and this issue becoming tied to other negotiations. 

According to Sir Jim “The delays on the redundancy costs have added complexity and drift and we do feel we are trying to do too many things at once. The big problem we’ve got is we do not have the time because the public aren’t as patient with us as we’d like them to be, because of the mess we had go into.”

“I am as irritated and annoyed as anyone else is about how long it has dragged. It’s no way to be treating people but it is complex and it is not about compulsory redundancies. We are going hammer and tongs to get things resolved as quickly as we can. It has gone on too long.”

On ICBs he says he always thought 42 was too many with too much difference in their sizes, and that they were given too much to do and had to work with a very expensive and incredibly complicated operating model.

In future ICBs will concentrate on commissioning rather than performance management – Sir Jim admits he did not love commissioning but feels the absence of it in recent years has been a problem and that they need to restore its value, with performance management largely sitting with regions 

On resident doctors “We are in bad way, where there is significant dislocation between them and what they need and what they want, versus what we as employers want and need, versus what the population want.” 

Sir Jim says they need to fix some of the stuff that is causing irritation but also take a fundamental look at how the training and rotation works ‘as they clearly don’t like it’

Download the podcast here and to access the whole series follow the link below. 

For all the previous

In the Loop

podcasts with

Dame Jennifer Dixon

Lord Darzi

Professor Tas Qureshi

Dr Penny Dash, chair NHSE

Richard Meddings,

former chair NHSE,

Sir Jeremy Hunt,

Sir Andrew Dilnot,

Paul Johnson IFS

CLICK HERE

-oOo-

Probably the most listened to

Podcast in the NHS!

FREE!

Want to contact Roy Lilley?

Please use this e-address

roy.lilley@nhsmanagers.net 

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