The Health Secretary has warned care home workers they should "get another job" if they're not prepared to receive the Covid-19 vaccine.
Sajid Javid has ignored appeals from providers to "pause" the legal requirement for staff in England to be fully vaccinated.
It comes amid warning that some homes will be unable to cope if workers are forced to leave.
Nadra Ahmed, chair of the National Care Association, has urged the government to put back the November 11 deadline for staff to have both jabs, saying it will have a knock-on effect on the NHS if homes have to reduce resident numbers.
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However, Mr Javid seems unwilling to move the date, saying care home staff should not be working in the sector if they're not prepared to receive the vaccine.
He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “If you want to work in a care home you are working with some of the most vulnerable people in our country and if you cannot be bothered to go and get vaccinated, then get out and go and get another job.
“If you want to look after them, if you want to cook for them, if you want to feed them, if you want to put them to bed, then you should get vaccinated.
“If you are not going to get vaccinated then why are you working in care?
“If you think about your elderly relatives you might have in care homes, and the idea that someone wants to look after them and they don’t want to take a perfectly safe and effective vaccine that has been approved by our regulators, been used all over the world, because somehow they have got some objection to this vaccine, then really, honestly, they shouldn’t be in our care homes.
“They should go and get another job. I am very clear on that.”
Ms Ahmed noted that care homes have already overcome significant resistance among staff to the vaccines.
In November last year, shortly before the vaccine programme launched, she said just 40 per cent of staff were willing to get it.
Nonetheless, 86 per cent of staff are now fully vaccinated, she said.
She told Today: “We are not anti-vaccine. What we are saying is we needed a bit more time to get people where they needed to be.”
She said that without a delay to the deadline, care home homes and the wider health sector will be impacted.
“The situation is chronic now with staffing and that deadline will just add to it,” she said.
“We will have providers who are no longer able to staff their services safely and that can only mean they will have to be handing back contracts.
“They will have to be looking at whether they can minimise the number of beds that they use to keep themselves open, which will have a direct effect on the NHS’s ability to discharge people out of hospital and into care settings.”
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