Mandatory Covid jabs dropped for NHS staff in England from mid-March

Sajid Javid has said that the mandatory Covid-19 jabs for health and social care workers in England will be scrapped on March 15.

The rules for care home staff came into effect in November and were due to be in place for frontline staff in April.

The policy was resisted by some workers, with warnings that they would be fired if they did not comply. The decision was also criticized by several MPs.

The health secretary, Javid, said earlier this year that it was no longer appropriate to require vaccinations as a condition of deployment. He said the regulations in health and social care would end on March 15.

The question of whether care workers who left their jobs could return was raised immediately. Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, said that Javid's announcement was too late to repair the damage done to the care sector.

He told the Guardian that staff have already left residential care services and found new jobs.

When the original decision was made to make it a legal requirement, Delta was the dominant variant of the virus, but that has since been replaced by the less severe Omicron.

He still considers it a professional responsibility for health and care staff and others who work in the health and social care sectors to be vaccinations.

The government launched a public consultation last month to discuss the removal of the legal requirement. Javid told MPs that the consultation received more than 90,000 responses from across the health and social care sector.

He said that 98% of the workforce of the health service and 98% of care home staff had received at least one dose of the vaccine.

He said that the government was committed to working with the health and social care sectors to engage with those who are yet to make a decision.

In England, there are nearly 2 million days lost to staff absences.

The medical royal colleges and health professional regulators are working closely with the ministers to strengthen guidance on the prevention and control of infections.

Unison said many staff who left care homes due to the requirement were unlikely to return to their jobs.

The RCN general secretary and chief executive said that the change was the right one, and that the threat of losing their jobs over the heads of the small minority of staff who had not been was the reason for it.

She said it was too late for those who have already lost their jobs. She said that the health and social care workforce crisis is affecting nursing staff's ability to care safely for their patients. There are tens of thousands of nursing vacancies.

The head of care at Unison said there were always better ways of increasing the jab rate. Thousands of staff quit care homes because the vaccine was mandatory. The struggling sector could not afford to lose these workers.

Many won't go back. They have found better paying work. Ensuring that every care worker is paid at least the real living wage could be a way to make up for the distress caused. The current staffing crisis would be solved by that.