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Doctors’ leaders in England have welcomed a move to suspend some targets for GPs to enable them to concentrate on the vaccination programme, but warned the service remains under pressure.
NHS England has told GPs that routine health checks for the over-75s and for new patients may be deferred. Dr Farah Jameel, chair of the BMA’s England GP committee, said suspending some paperwork would create some additional capacity, but that individual practices would have to decide how much they could switch to delivering Covid jabs.
“That will then allow us to support the national effort - the national priority being to one vaccinating the nation as quickly as possible,” she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
“We have been struggling with significant prevailing workforce pressures - backlog pressures, winter pressures, pandemic pressures.
“Whilst these changes make a difference and start to create some time, I think every single practice will have to look at just how much time it does release.
“What it will do is free up staff time who are busy filling some of these tick-box exercises, so some of our staff can be redeployed to the vaccination effort.”
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3DhqGTC
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