Red tape must not prevent retired GPs returning to the frontline, says College

As more GPs offer to return to help with the vaccination programme, the Royal College of GPs has stated that red tape needs to be removed to allow this to happen efficiently

Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “Recently retired GPs – and other healthcare professionals – signed up in droves to help with efforts to tackle the COVID-19 vaccination programme. These are people with huge amounts of skill and experience to offer, yet in many cases, this valuable resource is being under-utilised.

“We’ve just had the fantastic news that the Oxford vaccine for COVID-19 has been approved by the MHRA. This will be a game changer in escalating the scale and pace at which GPs, our teams and colleagues across the NHS can vaccinate patients against this dreadful virus. But we won’t be able to do it alone – and there is an army of retired medics waiting to help. We need to allow them to do so, and keep bureaucratic barriers to this to the bare minimum.

“Requiring people to submit more than 20 pieces of documentation, some of which have low relevance to the task they will be doing, and some of which some retired medics and returners to the profession won’t even have, is a deterrent for them getting involved at a time when we need all hands on deck.”