Ally McLaws

NHS Scotland and the Scottish Government shouldn’t for one second think that any amount of defibrillator intervention will revive the dead donkey that is mandatory covid jabs for NHS staff. As England and Wales push forward with compulsory jabs in the care home sector and consult on the NHS potentially following suit, we should not waste a moment on this side road of distraction despite the logic of it.

There is a crucial difference between south and north of the border. Trusts in England are not as hide-bound to trades union agreements through the Area Partnership Forums as our Health Boards. It is only in Scotland that we have a cast iron agreement that there will be no redundancies, for example.

Very little can ever change in NHSScotland without the agreement of the APF, much to the frustration of many health board directors, and the executive leadership teams.

Truth is, there is little that senior managers can do about it so at a time of massive priorities and the need for using resources to best effect no-one should be diverting time and staff resource to this cause.

I was director of communications for Scotland’s largest health board – Greater Glasgow and Clyde – between 2002 and 2019 and I was tasked to lead a campaign to increase the pathetically low rate of staff flu jag uptake. Despite every effort in Scotland less than 40 per cent of staff accepted the free jag. In Glasgow and Clyde the rate was much lower than even that.

Clinical leaders, victims of flu and public health and vaccine experts were used to persuade staff that the flu vaccination was safe, would not make you ill as it was not a live vaccine, would help protect those who had it from the most severe symptoms and would also protect their vulnerable patients.

Still there was opposition and resistance by the majority of individuals but crucially there was huge opposition to any suggestion of compulsory vaccination.

It even took more than a year to get agreement for a powerful article by a leading public health consultant to write to staff about compulsory vaccination being adopted in the US...because it was regarded as a 'threat' of something to come to Scottish NHS workers. The organisations in the US, however, did not have to win approval of the workforce to adopt such a stance which is why they have done it and we have not.

So, instead of pursuing compulsory vaccination possibilities as the next step health boards tried to tempt staff with raffle prizes for those who had the jag. They adopted more relaxed peer vaccination programmes with designated staff wandering the wards and clinics offering the jab and handing out bold badges declaring that they have had the jab and were protecting themselves and their patients.

Still there are thousands of frontline nurses and doctors working with vulnerable patients who refuse to accept the flu jag … and the same goes for the Covid 19 vaccines.

The life-saving arguments and moral duty are the same for both.

But the opposition to making them compulsory for NHS staff hasn’t changed which is why the mostly privatised nursing homes sector in England and Wales is being targeted first… in the misguided hope that it will create the first crack in the damn of opposition.

The opposition arguments put forward include existing employment contracts...nowhere does it state that any NHS employee in Scotland must get jabbed or lose their current job.

The prospect of rewriting contracts for 1.5 million NHS workers in the UK is mind boggling. Even if it could be achieved in England it would not be achieved for the 150,000 NHS workers in Scotland.

Although certain surgeons already have to accept Hepatitis B to be able to carry out their jobs the rights of individuals, even in high-risk NHS ward and community settings, trumps all suggestions of mandatory Covid or flu jabs.

There’s an argument that being moved away from such sensitive and patient-risky areas could be negotiated for staff who refuse vaccination but, even then, there are powerful arguments rallied for those who have medical reasons or other arguments for saying no.

The topic of mandatory vaccination programmes has dominated many hundreds of hours of debate on television and within our parliaments already. It will continue to do so and as an issue it will burn and burn.

It will not, however, result in mandatory Covid 19 vaccinations for NHS staff in Scotland and senior managers, politicians and board members know it won’t.

This utter waste of time would be as well dumped right now: the NHS runs itself. Managers shuffle the money they are allocated by Government and push priorities when politicians demand it. The NHS workforce runs the service and without their collective approval major changes just don’t happen.

The powers of the Area Partnership Forum are in many ways excellent and have been hard fought for and won. They will not be given up easily – or at all perhaps.

In Scotland, we would be wise not to even try to revive the dead donkey that England and Wales are so determined to be seen not to drop.

There’s more important business to focus on – such as using every ounce of skill and intellect to tackle the growing waiting lists and the ambulance crisis and preparing for what could be the most challenging winter the NHS has ever faced.