Care Home Residents to Receive COVID Jab but Not Staff
NHS England (NHSE) has confirmed the eligibility criteria and key dates for its upcoming autumn 2025 Covid-19 and flu vaccination programmes.
Frontline health and social care workers, including staff working in care homes for older adults, will not be eligible for a Covid vaccination under the national programme launching this September.
In a statement the government said that: “Current vaccines provide good protection against severe disease and hospitalisation. UKHSA surveillance data relating to last autumn’s programme shows that those who received a vaccine were around 43% less likely to be admitted to hospital with COVID-19 from 2 weeks following vaccination, compared to those who remained unvaccinated.”
“Vaccination continues to help protect against severe illness, hospitalisations and deaths arising from COVID-19. Last winter, between November, December and January around 13,000 people were admitted to hospital with the virus.”
Accepting advice from vaccination programme experts the JCVI, NHS COVID vaccinations will only be offered to the following groups:
- adults aged 75 years and over
- residents in a care home for older adults
- individuals aged six months and over who are defined as immunosuppressed
The move is a change from last Autumn, where health and social care workers were eligible for Covid-19 vaccination.
The exclusion of care home and NHS workers from the NHS vaccination programme is, the government says, based on scientific evidence that in the current era of high population immunity to COVID-19, additional COVID-19 doses provide very limited, if any, protection against infection and any subsequent onward transmission of infection.
For health and care workers, this means that COVID-19 vaccination likely now has only a very limited impact on reducing staff sickness absence.
