The High Authority for Health (HAS) recommends, in an opinion published on Friday, to extend vaccination skills to more health professionals.
While vaccination is normally a competence reserved for doctors, the High Authority for Health (HAS) recommends, in an opinion published on Friday, to allow nurses, pharmacists and midwives to prescribe and administer non-live vaccines registered in the vaccination schedule for people aged 16 and over: Influenza, DT-Polio, Papillomavirus, Hepatitis A and B, Pneumococcus and Meningococcus.
Children and adolescents up to the age of 16 are not affected by this advisory and willthe subject of a second specific work“, indicates the HAS. This extension also does not concern immunocompromised people, whose vaccination schedules can be specific and complex. In addition, the HAS sets two conditions for this expansion of skills: the effective completion of appropriate training and the strengthening of the traceability of vaccination.
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By recommending extending vaccine skills to more healthcare professionals, the HAS wishes to “increase opportunities to offer vaccinationand increase the vaccination coverage of the French. She also points out that it isan essential element of a global and coordinated approach to health with the objectives of reducing health inequalities and promoting a global prevention approach“.
Some of these professionals were already authorized to administer or prescribe different vaccines. Midwives were thus, in 2016, the first to be able to perform vaccination under specific conditions in women, newborns and their families. More recently, nurses and pharmacists have been integrated into seasonal flu vaccination. All were included in the vaccination campaign against Covid-19.
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This sharing of tasks worries doctors, who see it as a dismantling of their skills. And also poses a problem of economic equation in their offices, where quick acts compensate for long and complex acts.