College demands more detail on upcoming Covid booster campaign

Dr Gary Howsam, Vice Chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “GPs and our teams have worked incredibly hard to protect as many patients as possible from COVID-19. The vaccination is our route out of this pandemic, and the majority of the programme has been delivered in primary care.

"The success of the COVID vaccination programme and last year's expanded flu vaccine programme has been the result of meticulous planning by GPs, our teams and colleagues across the health service. While we now know there will be a Covid-19 booster vaccination campaign this Autumn, we still need more details about how this will work, including confirmation of whether co-administration with the annual flu vaccination programme will go ahead, so that plans and decisions can be made appropriately."

"General practice has a long track record of delivering vaccination campaigns and patients, particularly our most vulnerable patients, trust GP and our teams to get the job done. Alongside our pharmacy and other colleagues across the NHS, general practice will retain a key role in the programme. Due to the intense workforce and workload pressures already facing our services, not every practice will be able to get involved in the booster campaign, as they will be focussed on other essential care. We want to see efforts to ensure high numbers of trained non-clinical vaccinators available to work within general practice, supervised by a smaller number of primary care clinicians, to help to deliver this in the Autumn."

Further information

(For media only)

RCGP Press office – 020 3188 7633/7494/7574
Out of hours: 020 3188 7659 
press@rcgp.org.uk

Notes to editor

The Royal College of General Practitioners is a network of more than 53,000 family doctors working to improve care for patients. We work to encourage and maintain the highest standards of general medical practice and act as the voice of GPs on education, training, research and clinical standards.