Although resident vaccination has reached 95% of care homes, staff vaccination does not appear to have been followed through with the same level of effectiveness.

Several care homes have reported that vaccination teams have entered care homes without enough vaccines for staff as well as residents. 

Care homes reported:

- Staff were unavailable when whole home vaccination was taking place due to shift patterns.

- Staff were unable to have the vaccine due to medical reasons.

- Staff were unable to get alternative local appointment for vaccination.

- A need to wait for 28 days if tested positive with COVID-19.

Furthermore, staff have also been refusing due to disability, pregnancy, religious/philosophical beliefs or on the grounds that it has not been tested on enough people. But making it a requirement for staff who refuse, could lead to potential discrimination claims, which may be difficult to objectively justify.

In fact, there is currently no legal basis in the UK to make vaccination for Covid-19 mandatory. In fact, the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 specifically precludes any government regulations from ‘requiring a person to undergo medical treatment’ which includes vaccinations.

However, with deaths still rising in care homes and the total number of deaths in care homes now at 24,709, care providers are under pressure to make their care homes as safe as possible, and this low take up of the vaccine by care workers is creating significant operational challenges for them.