Flu vaccination among NHS workers falls to lowest level in A DECADE, despite warnings

Just four in 10 NHS frontline workers have rolled up their sleeves for the flu vaccine – the lowest uptake in a decade, MailOnline can reveal.

Although the NHS has urged vulnerable Britons to take the plunge amid predictions of a harsh winter, it itself has failed to persuade most of its staff to do the same.

Primary care workers such as doctors and nurses are offered the vaccine for free each year to prevent the virus from being accidentally spread to vulnerable people they meet at work, such as nurses. B. elderly or cancer patients.

It comes as hospitals grapple with what has been dubbed “Flu Nami”, with the contagious virus hospitalizing almost 60 times more people this year than last winter.

Data from NHS England shows an average of 1,939 people were admitted to hospital with flu each day in the past week. This was 67 percent higher than the 1,162 recorded the previous week and 57 times higher than the 34 recorded at the same time in 2021.

Lower than usual uptake of flu shots among NHS frontline workers has been revealed by MailOnline analysis of a decade of government data.

According to the latest available data compiled by the UK Health Security Agency, just 41.8 per cent of all NHS frontline workers in England received the free flu shot on 30 November.

This is the lowest annual vaccination rate among workers since 2012, when just 40.8 percent received the vaccine.

It also represents a sharp drop from 2020, when seven in 10 workers (71 percent) opted to get the flu shot.

Broken down by group, just 41.8 per cent of NHS GPs and 44.4 per cent of primary care nurses received the flu shot.

It comes as the UK grapples with a flurry of flu cases, putting added pressure on a health service already beset by rising winter demands, Strep A and staff strikes.

The latest survey data for England shows an average of 1,939 flu patients per day in hospital in the week ending 18 December.

This is 67 percent more than the 1,162 registered the previous week and a whopping 57 times more than the 32 registered at the same time in 2021.

The flu rate, although still lower than Covid, has also risen sharply from the daily average of 480 at the end of November.

Professor Paul Hunter, a public health expert at the University of East Anglia, told MailOnline that health workers on the frontline of flu vaccines are vital not only for their own health, but also that of the public and the NHS as whole.

He said: “One of the biggest problems in a bad flu year is healthcare workers getting flu and the workforce being unable to cope with the demand on the NHS.

“The more healthcare workers [that] Getting the flu increases the likelihood that vulnerable patients will become infected, increasing the pressure on the healthcare system due to delayed discharge or the need for artificial resuscitation beds.”

He added that the NHS in general has always struggled to encourage most frontline workers to take part in the flu shot.

But Professor Hunter speculated that another factor delaying this year’s effort could be vaccine fatigue due to the many Covid injections NHS staff have been encouraged and in some cases threatened to take.

“I suspect part of the low uptake is due to vaccine fatigue,” he said.

The graph shows weekly hospitalizations for flu (light blue line) and Covid (dark blue line) per 100,000 population in England, based on positive tests

The graph shows the weekly number of hospital admissions by age for influenza. Admissions are highest among the over 85s

“Maybe people feel that the Covid vaccine alone will be enough, or maybe the messages about Covid and flu vaccines interfere.”

Another potential problem is that people forget how bad the flu can be because it has died down over the past two years, he said.

Flu largely disappeared in the first two winters after the Covid outbreak, as restrictions and changes in socializing habits kept cases low.

Professor Hunter said data on flu surveys underestimated the potential seriousness of the situation, as it underestimated the true health impact of the virus.

He said: “The most serious post-flu illnesses and deaths are not directly caused by the flu virus and may not even be diagnosed as flu because laboratory diagnosis is impossible when someone comes to the hospital.

“Instead, they are due to secondary bacterial infections because the flu virus damages the lining of the upper airway and can spread these bacterial infections.”

Professor Hunter said this damage, caused by the body’s weakening of the flu, was behind the rise in Strep A infections which have killed more than two dozen British children so far.

A spokesman for NHS England said they were continuing their efforts to convince staff to get the flu vaccine and thanked those who agreed.

“Flu seriously affects the health of thousands of people every year and the NHS needs as many of its staff as possible to be fit over the coming months, so we will continue to promote vaccination coverage among healthcare workers,” they said. .

One measure to encourage adoption is sending out reminders to frontline workers to get the push, e.g. B. Print messages on their paychecks.

The spokesman added that there was no shortage of flu shots for NHS workers.

Health regulations require every NHS employer to offer 100 per cent of their frontline workers a free flu vaccine every year.

Making the flu shot compulsory for NHS staff as a condition of their employment was once mooted by former health secretary Matt Hancock.

However, his successors did not make such a commitment after Sajid Javid, who Mr. replaced Hancock, implemented a similar schedule of compulsory Covid vaccinations for NHS staff at 11am.

The U-turn followed warnings that the introduction of compulsory Covid vaccinations for NHS employment would result in a crippling staffing shortage that would see up to 80,000 workers redundancies.