Will you get vaccinated against COVID-19?
Intended for healthcare professionals
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Will you get vaccinated against COVID-19?

Neil Brimblecombe @NeilBrimblecom1 Consultant editor, Mental Health Practice

The availability of effective immunisations is being hailed as the light at the end of the tunnel, finally enabling the world to emerge from the darkness of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mental Health Practice. 24, 1, 5-5. doi: 10.7748/mhp.24.1.5.s1

Published: 07 January 2021

Will mental health nurses grasp this opportunity to take the vaccine and protect themselves, their families and their patients?

Perhaps, surprisingly, many may not, if the history of relatively low rates of influenza immunisation in NHS mental health trusts is at all predictive (Public Health England 2019).

Explanations for non-uptake of immunisation include doubts about its effectiveness, the potential for side effects, a belief in not being personally vulnerable to the disease and distrust of the pharmaceutical industry (Dini et al 2018).

But simply urging mental health nurses to put patients first and get immunised is not enough to persuade doubters.

Nurses also have a duty of care to themselves.

I suggest that, as a profession, we ask ourselves four questions to inform our decisions about the COVID-19 immunisation:

1. What is the evidence of its effectiveness?

2. What is the risk to me of having or not having immunisation – severe or minor, life threatening or transitory?

3. What is the risk to my patients of myself having or not having immunisation – could I present a real risk to them, or others, if I don’t take the vaccine?

4. And, importantly, what evidence will I base these views on – is it anecdotal or verified data?

With these questions answered honestly, I hope I will find most of my colleagues standing alongside me in the immunisation queue.

‘Will mental health nurses grasp this opportunity to take the vaccine and protect themselves, their families and their patients?’

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