Dr. Lynda Sisson:

I thank the Deputy. We are actively looking at the flu season coming up and we will start vaccinating on 20 September. I will outline two of the main drivers in increasing flu vaccine, the first of which is to increase the availability of the vaccine. The second concerns increasing the education and communication around it. In terms of increasing availability, we have an enormous peer vaccinator programme in the HSE, which has allowed other nurses in local areas to provide the vaccination to their peers. This year we will include paramedics and pharmacists and we may also include some of the allied health professionals. We will increase the number of peer vaccinators that are available on site to give the vaccine to staff in their local area. In previous years, that has really increased the number of people who have taken up the vaccine. In addition, we are looking to see if we can get healthcare workers vaccinated in their local GPs and pharmacies free of charge and that will hopefully be an option for us in September. Educating healthcare workers is an ongoing thing. We have developed HSeLanD modules and we have a number of communications. We have a number of areas where we try to break down some of the myths about the flu vaccine and we have been working hard on that.

The next step is to start looking at risk-assessing front-line workers and requiring them as part of a risk assessment to partake of the vaccine. That is something that we are exploring at the moment and it is something that has been very successful in increasing flu vaccine uptake in Australia. We may be developing a model on that for this year because, as the committee knows, it will be critical for our healthcare workers to be vaccinated this year, especially-----