NHS England will provide extra Covid vaccination clinical staff at cost to GP practices

GP practices participating in the Covid vaccination enhanced service will be able to access additional clinical and admin staff from ‘national workforce providers’ at cost, NHS England has said.

Adding that it anticipates that practices ‘will need and want to provide the majority of the required staff from their own workforce’, NHS England said free-of-charge volunteer stewards may also become available to practices via local commissioners.

In slides presented to a GP webinar yesterday, NHS England said immunisers, registered healthcare professionals and health care assistants would be made available.

It added: ‘Practices would have to pay for clinical and administrative staff (incurring costs in line with Agenda for Change and terms of the provider) and the intention is that voluntary resources would be a free resource to primary care.’

It added that Primary Care Networks (PCNs) ‘should speak to their local system in the first instance’ regarding how to access the additional workforce.

NHS England also reiterated that clinical staff that will be involved in administration of the vaccine will need to complete online training. It added that this will be provided by Public Health England and Health Education England.

Meanwhile, training for con-clinical staff ‘will be developed centrally from materials already available for flu’, it added.

‘All staff will need on-site training for cover SOPs, site flow and IT etc. as well as NHS mandatory training for those new to the NHS,’ the slides said.

The news comes as it was made clear this week that the £150m fund to keep GP services running throughout the Covid vaccination campaign is the sum of additional pandemic funding for practices ‘until March’.