One in four of Hackney’s social care workers are still unvaccinated against Covid, putting the sector at risk of being understaffed.
This “will likely contribute to pressures during winter” as the uptake of the vaccine among social care workers is lower in Hackney than other London authorities, the Health Scrutiny Commission was told on Wednesday.
Hackney has 600 social care workers who support people who are either older, live with a disability or a physical or mental illness.
The revelation follows last week’s announcement that all frontline NHS staff must be fully vaccinated by April. Cllr Peter Snell raised his “concern about addressing both staffing needs and also ensuring we don’t lose too many staff through non-vaccination”.
Helen Woodland, Group Director for Adults, Health & Integration, said: “Our rates across the social care workforce in general, including our own staff, are 75 per cent and we know we want to get them much higher than that.”
She added that there were plans in place to “overcome whatever hesitancy and barriers that they have in place” and therefore “we’re relatively confident that we will be able to achieve quite high levels of vaccination across the social care workforce by the spring deadline.”
94% of Hackney’s care home workers are now vaccinated after it was made compulsory for the sector.
As of last Saturday, 114,120 Hackney residents over the age of 12 remain unvaccinated against Covid-19.
