Sir, – The HSE is recruiting vaccinators and deems the following healthcare workers only as appropriate for training as vaccinators: nurses, midwives, doctors, emergency medical technicians, paramedics, pharmacists and physiotherapists.
Given that these professionals are also needed in their normal occupations, the narrow range of recruitment defined by the HSE will make finding vaccinators difficult and will impede the return of normal health services.
Nurses and doctors are particularly in demand at the moment, and it doesn’t make sense to waste them on a single task such as vaccination, when there are many other healthcare workers capable of doing it.
In the UK, the NHS is recruiting everyone it possibly can to be trained as vaccinators, from healthcare assistants to nursing students.
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I am a phlebotomist, meaning that I take blood samples from patients. This means I need to find venous access in a patient; it is a far more complex and tricky procedure than vaccination. I also perform intravenous cannulation and other skin-puncturing procedures. Some of us are even trained in vaccination.
My colleagues and I are highly skilled professionals; in fact, we spend more time performing skin-puncturing procedures. than the professions listed in the HSE’s list,
Why are we excluded from vaccinator training when physiotherapists, emergency medical technicians, etc, who are either not skilled in these kinds of procedures or are not routinely performing them, are being recruited? I believe the issue is due to professional regulatory bodies providing their consent for vaccinator training. However, the HSE is capable of approving any suitably competent healthcare professionals within its workforce for administering vaccines.
The vaccine supply has been an issue; however, the HSE’s refusal to widen the vaccine taskforce is a disaster waiting to happen. – Yours, etc,
ANN McDEVITT,
Castleknock, Dublin 15.