Simbindi
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
People who need to receive their covid vaccinations at home are missing out because their eligibility is not being recognised by GPs, experts have warned.
There have been numerous reports of housebound people being told they are ineligible for a home visit in recent weeks, with some home care providers saying only a minority of their elderly clients have been vaccinated so far.
Chit Selvarajah, policy manager at the charity Independent Age, said: “We have heard from people who say they are housebound being told they weren’t considered as housebound and told to go to a vaccination centre as they are not eligible for a home visit.
“We don’t know how many people have been vaccinated but it’s likely to be very small numbers at the moment.”
No official figures have been published on how many people have been vaccinated in their own homes, but NHS England is offering GPs an additional £10 for every housebound patient they vaccinate, in an indication it is concerned about the speed of vaccinating this cohort.
Ruthe Isden, head of health and care influencing at Age UK, believes some older people have “slipped into being effectively housebound” over the last year, and are not yet registered as such on GP databases.
She said: “The pandemic has hit the fast forward button on ageing for a lot of people. They’ve aged a long way in a short period and seen their health really deteriorate, and often they are not going to proactively identify themselves as needing more help.
“It’s vital we are thinking systematically about reaching this group. At the moment, there seems to be considerable variation in how people are followed up.”
One homecare provider, Cera, has said many of the elderly people it cares for are either “too frail” to travel to vaccination centres or “fear infection” if they do so.
NHSE has said people are eligible for a vaccination at home if they are unable to leave their home at all, or require significant assistance due to illness, frailty, surgery, mental ill health or are nearing end of life. It is unclear how GPs should identify these patients.
HSJ has been told a similar pattern is developing in covid vaccine uptake that is usually seen in the uptake of the flu jab, with higher rates in younger, more mobile age groups.
Jacob Lant, head of policy and public affairs at Healthwatch England, said the “definition” of housebound should be broadened to include those who “feel housebound in the context of covid”.
The Department of Health and Social Care and NHSE were approached for comment.
The rollout of vaccines to people in their own homes appears to have been slow in part due to the storage and transport complexities of the vaccine itself.
One primary care network leader told HSJ: “We’ve ended up delegating the job as it was going to be so difficult to coordinate — collecting the vaccines from the site, needing two people to sign them out, the clinical commissioning group needing to check the cool box, et cetera… and all for 15 patients.
“We decided as a PCN to subcontract it to the community team… they do home visits and the covid virtual wards so might as well use them for this too.”
https://www.hsj.co.uk/primary-care/...ed-for-vaccination-nhs-warned/7029535.article