Britain’s socialised healthcare system is requiring retired doctors and nurses to meet a checklist that requires “equality, diversity, and human rights” training before they can help administer Chinese virus vaccines.
Despite widespread reports of National Health Service (NHS) staff shortages, former health workers are being forced to fulfil a 21-point checklist before being allowed to administer vaccinations.
Retired GP Jessica Jones, 59, a doctor of over 30 years, told The Times: “We were asked to do fire training, radicalisation recognition and things that make you wonder if the NHS is really desperate to have us back.”
“Surely we are capable of giving an intramuscular injection. If they’re really desperate, they will make it less ridiculous,” Dr Jones added.
The checklist for retired doctors and nurses includes sections irrelevant to vaccinations such as “data security awareness”, “preventing radicalisation”, and “equality, diversity & human rights”.
Professor Martin Marshall told the Daily Mail that “some of these bureaucratic demands are ridiculous” and warned that “a box-ticking mentality is thwarting would-be NHS returnees”.
Martin, who serves as the chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners (GPs), went on to say: “I fear that the heavy-handed approach is not just undermining the goodwill of applicants, but is acting as a worrying deterrent to badly needed recruitment.”
Recently retired GP Claire Barker wrote in The Telegraph that she felt “the most likely explanation is that the department responsible for recruiting vaccinators has not actually considered this form. It will prevent almost every willing applicant from being recruited.”
Since March, some 40,000 doctors and nurses have applied to return to service during the pandemic. Of those, 30,000 were eligible, but only 5,000 were taken back by July.
The checklist does, however, include modules on “managing anaphylaxis”, “resuscitation”, and “vaccine administration” should a patient experience an allergic reaction to the vaccine, as was experienced by two NHS nurses on the first day of the vaccine rollout in the country.
Since the beginning of the jab rollout on December 27th, some 944,539 people throughout the country have received the first dose of the vaccine.
An NHS spokesman said that it is “categorically untrue” that there have been any delays to administering the vaccines because of the bureaucratic checklist process.
“Regardless of a person’s background in healthcare, appropriate training and checks are necessary to handle the vaccine, which is why important processes are in place to make sure that former members of staff are up to speed on protocols and delivery so that vaccinators are fully equipped with the skills to safely vaccinate patients in line with Public Health England standards,” the spokesman said, without explaining what the relevance of “equality, diversity, and human rights” was supposed to be.
Amidst the supposedly faster-spreading variant of the Chinese virus, health officials have been warning of staff shortages within the NHS.
The chairwoman of the British Association of Critical Care Nurses, Nicki Credland, said: “We simply don’t have enough critical care nurses.
“We didn’t have enough nurses when we started, so we can’t possibly expect there to be enough nurses miraculously nine months later when you add in things like sickness.”
Despite this, the majority of Britain’s emergency Nightengale hospitals, which were quickly constructed during the initial phases of the pandemic, at a cost of £220 million, have generally remained empty.
NHS bosses have reportedly begun preparations to utilise the coronavirus facilities in the coming weeks but it is unclear how they would be staffed, if manpower rather than space is the issue the NHS faces.
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