Vaccination against swine flu starts in hospitals today for frontline health care professionals and for patients in at-risk groups. From next Monday, GP surgeries will start to receive their deliveries of the vaccine. The programme – one of the first swine flu vaccination programmes in the world to start – will continue over the next few weeks.
Two million frontline health and social care workers will be first in line for the vaccine, because they are at increased risk of infection themselves and therefore also pose a risk to their patients.
The Department of Health, advised by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, says that the vaccine should then be given to at-risk groups of patients in the following order of priority:
- people aged over six months and under 65 years in current seasonal flu vaccine clinical at risk groups (about 5 million people).
- all pregnant women (about 0.5 million people).
- household contacts of people with compromised immune systems, for example people in regular close contact with patients on treatment for cancer (about 0.5 million people).
- people aged 65 and over in the current seasonal flu vaccine clinical at risk groups (about 3.5 million people). This does not include otherwise healthy over-65s, because they appear to have some natural immunity to the virus.
- GP surgeries are expected to contact their patients in the relevant groups.
The decision on when to offer swine flu vaccination to the wider healthy population – if at all – will be made as more becomes known about how the pandemic is progressing, and about the vaccine itself.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, said: “This is the first pandemic for which we have had vaccine to protect people. I urge everyone in the priority groups to have the vaccine – it will help prevent people in clinical risk groups from getting swine flu and the complications that may arise from it.
“It's important for frontline health and social care workers to have the vaccine. It will help prevent them and their families getting the virus from patients, it will stop them passing the virus onto their patients, it will potentially protect them from mutated strains and it will reduce the disruption to NHS services caused by people being absent due to illness.”