GPs to begin offering coronavirus vaccine

Local vaccination services run by family doctors and their teams will open across England this week, as the roll out of the biggest vaccination programme in NHS history gains further momentum.

Practices in more than 100 parts of the country are taking delivery of the vaccine from 14 December, with groups of health providers setting up local vaccination centres in villages, towns and cities covering every part of the country.

NHS England has said that nurses, paramedics, pharmacists and other NHS staff will work alongside GPs to vaccinate those aged 80 and over, as well as care home workers and residents, identified as priority groups for the life-saving vaccine. Residents of care homes in England will also receive their first vaccine later this week after distributors finalise new, stringent processes to ensure safe delivery of the PfizerBioNTech vaccine.

The NHS will contact people in the priority groups when it is their turn to receive the vaccine.

Nikki Kanani, NHS Director of Primary Care, said: “GPs, nurses, pharmacists and other primary care staff are eager to play their part in protecting people against coronavirus. This is the greatest vaccination programme ever undertaken by the NHS and, to help vaccinate people safely we will be working with local communities to deliver it in convenient and familiar settings. As a GP I am proud to be part of this huge national effort to protect our patients against the virus and I would urge the public to come forward when they are called up for the vaccine.”

Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “GPs and our teams are about to embark on an enormous challenge, delivering the Covid-19 vaccination programme in the community whilst also delivering the expanded flu vaccine programme and the usual care and services our patients rely on us for.

“There are also logistical challenges but general practice has an excellent track record of delivering mass vaccination programmes, and we want to use this experience to help protect people from Covid-19 and start getting life back to normal again. We won’t be vaccinating everyone all at once – it will be a relatively small number at first – but as long as there is supply, GPs and our teams at selected sites will start vaccinating people this week, starting with our most vulnerable patients.

“Patients will be contacted and invited for vaccination – we would urge them not to contact their practice enquiring about vaccination, we will contact them.”