As fewer people get their jabs for MMR (measles mumps and rubella), flu, and Covid – experts have warned there could be more outbreaks of diseases and poorer health in the region. It’s not a local, but national issue, leaders here say.
The NHS has launched a new strategy which aims to get more people vaccinated against deadly diseases.
Rachael Musgrave, Wigan’s director of public health, said: “Vaccines are our best defence for protecting people’s health. We have a huge variety of vaccination programmes and all those are there for a reason – to protect people.
“They are second only to clean water in terms of the impact of public health. We are keen to keep the vaccines going over the winter period.“Without a shadow of a doubt vaccines are important, if you look at the eradication of some diseases such as smallpox, polio and tetanus, which would kill and disable people in the past, they’ve gone (with the help of vaccines).
Vaccine uptake is lower across the board for the usual jabs of flu and Covid in Wigan, local health data has shown. But one big concern for Ms Musgrave is the drop in children getting an MMR jab.
Two-year-olds with the MMR jab have dropped from 95.3 per cent in 2013/14 to 92.5 per cent. Also, the number of five-year-olds who got both MMR jabs dropped from 92.4 per cent in 2014/15 to 88.4 per cent in 2022/23.
Health bosses have stressed that the consequences of less and less people getting vaccinated can be deadly. This is something the whole world saw when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Tim Dalton, a local GP who sits on a number of health boards, said: “We would get damaged kids, to be blunt. Measles Mumps and Rubella are perceived to be old childhood illnesses. People can go blind, go to hospital.
“For families and children that can be devastating at that time in their lives – and that is entirely preventable.
“People in more deprived communities have other priorities than their own health. They are trying to keep the house warm and feed the family, perhaps their health suffers as a result as they attend less health checks.
“We need to do something for those communities to make it as easy as possible. We need to understand what they need in that community.”
Ms Musgrave added: “We must not lose sight of how serious the complications can be when people aren’t vaccinated. That is why this is so important to drive uptake where it isn’t as high as we would like it to be.
“We saw through Covid what happens when we can’t control a virus. We ended up with consequences of people not being able to connect and children not going to school.
“This is the ultimate extreme example of what can happen when we can’t control an infection. Then we saw how much better we could control it when we had vaccines.”
She highlighted that Covid had wider implications on the economy as well as the ‘individual terrible impacts’. The impacts of another virus getting out of control without vaccines to stop it would be no different, the Local Democracy Reporting Service was told.
When it comes to the question of why this trend is happening now – there was no clear answer.
Ms Musgrave continued: “At this stage we would be speculating on reasons people don’t get vaccinations. I think there are a whole range of reasons, so for us to get under the skin of that, we need to talk to people.
“We need to talk to people to understand what people want to know about vaccines and the barriers to vaccination, whether that is infants, care workers or elderly people. I think there would be a whole host of reasons but I don’t think we could say today what that is.
“But getting vaccinated is better than being unvaccinated.”
She went on to say that what they can control in public health is making it as easy as possible for people to get vaccinated and offering as much information as possible. This in turn, could help people make a better and more informed choice.
The ambition of Wigan Council’s health team and their NHS partners is simply to get more people immunised against deadly viruses. Their task is in line with the national NHS strategy which looks to improve vaccine rollouts by helping people understand why they or their families need a vaccination and how to access it.
Other aspects of the NHS vaccination strategy include:
Explore use of the NHS App to improve the experience of booking a vaccination
Test the viability of extending online booking further
Simplifying access to appointments
Make co-administration of seasonal vaccinations the default model and more cost-effective
Provide a universal, core offer in a consistent location
Tailor the core offer for the local population and ensure core settings are not the only place to get vaccinated
Enable local flexibility to determine the provider network that delivers this offer
The last two points of this strategy are key Wigan’s the public health director and her team, as they want to enable particular locations in the area to get the health support they need. This all falls in line with their overarching plan to improve health inequalities in the region.
