Health secretary Matt Hancock has confirmed today that the ‘bureaucracy’ involved in signing up to be a ‘volunteer vaccinator’ will be reduced allowing retired GP’s and nurses to return to help deliver the vaccine.
This news comes after Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “There is an army of retired medics waiting to help. We need to allow them to do so, and keep bureaucratic barriers to this to the bare minimum.
“Requiring people to submit more than 20 pieces of documentation, some of which have low relevance to the task they will be doing, and some of which some retired medics and returners to the profession won’t even have, is a deterrent for them getting involved at a time when we need all hands on deck.”
Speaking to BBC Breakfast Mr Hancock confirmed: “We’re going to reduce the amount of bureaucracy that is needed there, and I’ve been working with the NHS on that.
“For instance, there’s one of the training programmes about needing to tackle terrorism.
“I don’t think that’s necessary, we’re going to stop that.
“And we’re going through the different parts of that process to streamline it as much as possible, but again that isn’t the rate-limiting step.
“Because at the moment the NHS, with the people that it has got already, is able to deliver the vaccine as it can be produced, but obviously I want to make that easier.”
