Latest updates: GPs and hospitals expected to delay some appointments in coming weeks to aid rollout of booster vaccines to combat Omicron variant
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Good morning. Boris Johnson has set a target for the government to offer all adults a booster vaccine by the end of the month. Here is our overnight story reporting the announcement.
This morning Sajid Javid, the health secretary, has been giving broadcast interviews, and he has admitted that, as GPs and hospitals in England focus on this target over the next few weeks, non-urgent appointments will be postponed. He told the Today programme:
It does mean that, when it comes to primary care, for the next couple of weeks that our GPs will only be focusing on urgent needs and vaccinations. And it also means that non-urgent appointments and elective surgeries may have to be postponed into the new year.
It will be anyone who’s got some elective surgery planned, for example, that can be postponed until the new year. So that might mean, for example, a knee operation or hip operation, something that sadly someone has probably been waiting [for] for a long time in any case, but the hospital concerned would have the right to postpone it if it meant they would get a lot more booster jabs done.
