NHS Issues National Guidance to End Mask Requirements
The NHS has now issued its new central guidance for use of face masks in clinical settings. It tells hospitals and other clinical settings to cease the requirement for staff, patients and visitors to wear a face mask unless Covid positive or working with those who are or may be Covid positive. This is good news, though it could go further as it means A&E staff and others working in untriaged settings will continue to be usually masked, plus it perpetuates the nonsense that masks prevent the spread of COVID-19. Read the new guidance in full below.
For health and care staff:
• Health and care staff should continue to wear facemasks as part of personal protective equipment required for transmission-based precautions when working in COVID-19/respiratory care pathways, and when clinically caring for suspected/confirmed COVID-19 patients. This is likely to include settings where untriaged patients may present such as emergency departments or primary care, depending on local risk assessment. In all other clinical care areas, universal masking should be applied when there is known or suspected cluster transmission of SARS-CoV-2, e.g. during an outbreak, and/or if new SARS-CoV-2 VOC emerge.
• Universal masking should also be considered in settings where patients are at high risk of infection due to immunosuppression e.g. oncology/haematology. This should be guided by local risk assessment.
• Health and care staff are in general not required to wear facemasks in nonclinical areas e.g. offices, social settings, unless this is their personal preference or there are specific issues raised by a risk assessment. This should also be considered in community settings.
For inpatients:
• Inpatients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 should be provided with a facemask on admission. This should be worn in multi-bedded bays and communal areas, e.g. waiting areas for diagnostics, if this can be tolerated and is deemed safe for the patient. They are not usually required in single rooms, unless, e.g., a visitor enters.
• All other inpatients are not necessarily required to wear a facemask unless this is a personal preference. However, in settings where patients are at high risk of infection due to immunosuppression e.g. oncology/haematology, patients may be encouraged to wear a facemask following a local risk assessment.
• Patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 transferring to another care area should wear a facemask (if tolerated) to minimise the dispersal of respiratory secretions and reduce environmental contamination.
• The requirement for patients to wear a facemask must never compromise their clinical care, such as when oxygen therapy is required or where it causes distress, e.g. paediatric/mental health settings.
For outpatients, UEC and primary care:
• Patients with respiratory symptoms who are required to attend for emergency treatment should wear a facemask/covering, if tolerated, or offered one on arrival.
• All other patients are not required to wear a facemask unless this is a personal preference.
For visitors:
• In inpatient settings where patients are at high risk of infection due to immunosuppression, e.g. oncology/haematology, visitors may be asked to wear a facemask following a local risk assessment.
• Visitors and individuals accompanying patients to outpatient appointments or the emergency department are not routinely required to wear a facemask unless this is a personal preference, although they may be encouraged to do so following a local risk assessment.
Now, will the hospitals and other clinical settings follow it, or will their “local risk assessments” have other ideas?
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Those refusing to wear masks will be issued with a lucky rabbits foot as a substitute
How can the rabbit be lucky if you have it’s foot?
The vegan option is a sprig of lavender or some clothes pegs
Personally, I’m never without my favourite pomander of an orange or apple studded with cloves. Unlike “face coverings”, the main constituent is edible, if hunger strikes,and cloves, when chewed, are a pleasant freshener.
Better than a rabbit having one of your feet.
Talking about feet, is the promised “return to imperial measures to celebrate the monarch’s jubilee” actually going to happen? Or was the purpose of the talk about it merely to bolster support for Boris Johnson in the Tory party? (Possibly the answer is “both”).
My Cornish Lucky Piskie (7/-6d plus p+p) does it or me!
Mask mandates may be gone but – incredibly – there are jab mandates for the DWP.
https://twitter.com/DrHoenderkamp/status/1531605831157960704/photo/1
“We are a passionate, inclusive, anti-racist organisation……”
……..but we engage in discrimination.
Hard to imagine the DEP being “passionate” about anything…
Oh great, I work in A&E, and I had such high hopes. As one of my colleagues has said, the lunatics have taken over the asylum and masks will probably never disappear in hospitals in a meaningful way…
Having had to make a number of visits to the RUH in Bath over the past few months, not once have I worn a mask, even where notices stated they were mandatory; not once was I pulled up.
It’s not so bad as a patient, but I can be certain I’ll be pulled up if I wasn’t wearing one as a doctor. Heck, I nearly lost my job when I worked in a hospice for refusing to wear a mask when looking after people who were already dying…
Just getting people used to obeying constantly changing, usually illogical often non-sensical orders on command.
They will reverse this as soon as they get to work on the Monkey Pox propaganda/hysteria project .
We should be alert to a sudden ‘gain of function’ in their new virus and the ’emergency’ closing of our borders just as the holiday season peaks. Their planned disruption of Air Travel seems to be going well – the Airlines can do nothing.
The important to thing to recognise is that they mean us harm: disruptive, mental, financial, social, environmental, medical and physical.
Can you say more about your take on the disruption of air travel. It’s certainly having an effect on a lot of people, taking away something they were looking forward to, or if it’s still allowed then beating them up (metaphorically) on the way to receiving it, causing it to taste much less sweet.
Let’s see then if Specsavers finally remove their OTT covid theatre “for our safety.” Somehow I doubt it.
Was just about to comment something similar.
We’re delivering an NHS service. Oh how have shop workers survived.
I was at a large Boots opticians a couple of months ago and the staff were all dressed up in their looney tunes get up. Unmasked I breezed in but no one bothered. There were a couple of other unmasked customers waiting, but most of the lemmings were covering up their frightened faces. What a pantomime.
Are Boots’ days numbered? Chaos and p. poor service at a local High Street store
Possibly. Or Boots may just be downgrading the level of service. (I’ve been waiting for Santander to go bust for years.)
The company is privately held, headquartered in Switzerland, with a big chunk owned by Italian-Monegasque oligarch Stefano Pessina. His wife Ornella Barra, the COO, is executive director of the European Pharmacists Forum and chairman of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers.
I saw a few days ago that someone else might try to buy it up.
Our local Boots is dreadful. The staff can be really rude and prescriptions sent by GPs are never ready on time, even urgent ones. They seem permanently surprised they are expected to have to deal with prescriptions. They moved into the site after our lovely, clued-in pharmacist retired. Very good at handing out vouchers for make-up though!
I was one of their customers a couple of years ago, after they took over another optician that I had used for a few decades. Fallen out with them now, if only on account of how they handle phone calls, via some kind of centralised call centre. I don’t like organisations that do that, diverting calls after one calls an advertised number, and end up dealing with automated call handling. No idea who you are dealing with and so on.
Is Vision Express the unwanted step child of the eye carers?
(They have published a no mask requirement on their site, hence me making an appointment for Sunday).
Good on them and you.
The beauty of the free market.
I can confirm that my Vision Express is completely relaxed about whether customers choose to wear masks – and has been for some time. I would never go to Specsavers, as their vari-focal lenses are awful quality.
I dont use Specsavers because they refused to advertise on GB News. Same for IKEA. Just shows the mentality at the top of some of these outfits.
Go to Vision Express instead.
Maybe their new ad could be an old lady falling and breaking her hip due to wearing a mask and fogged up glasses with the tag line “she should have come to Vision Express”.
I agree that most Specsavers are OTT but the one my daughter manages does not insist on the Covid theatre yet most customers continue to wear masks despite my daughter and her colleagues telling them they don’t need to.
I was recently in the UK and got an eye test at Specsavers Solihull. People only allowed in with an appointment, with lots of outside posters about requiring masks. At the appointed time, I walked up to the shop, stated I had an appointment. I was asked if I felt comfortable wearing a mask. I said no, nothing more was said. Got eyes tested with no further fuss. Same when I collected my specs the following week.
There is nothing to celebrate here. Some quotations: ‘It tells hospitals and other clinical settings to cease the requirement for staff, patients and visitors to wear a face mask unless Covid positive or working with those who are or may be Covid positive.’ Note the phrase ‘who are or may be’. What does that mean? What it DOES mean is that individual NHS Trusts can choose to retain these accursed ‘mandates’ as long as they like. And they will. ‘This is likely to include settings where untriaged patients may present such as emergency departments or primary care, depending on local risk assessment. In all other clinical care areas, universal masking should be applied when there is known or suspected cluster transmission of SARS-CoV-2, eg during an outbreak, and/or if new SARS-CoV-2 VOC emerge.’ Note the phrase ‘Known or suspected’. This can (and will) be interpreted to mean anywhere at any time. ‘However, in settings where patients are at high risk of infection due to immunosuppression eg oncology/haematology, patients may be encouraged to wear a facemask following a local risk assessment.’ Note the phrase ‘at high risk’. Who determines the level of risk? This can and will be used to impose… Read more »
I guess it fall to us then, if they are following guidance they were told in no uncertain terms they cannot refuse treatment and that some people have exemptions.
Round and round the madhouse we go!
Patients who are suspected of having Covid should wear a mask. This usually applies to patients with active pulmonary TB, whether it needs to be applied to SARS-CoV-2 patients is dubious.
Even though we all know they don’t work?
For TB they probably do work by stopping or reducing the bacteria filled sputum. The person only has to wear the mask when being examined, nursed or moved between departments, this is reverse barrier nursing.
That’s what I took from it too. We must welcome any small steps – but this is a very small step indeed.
We will only be free of this divisive mask nonsense when it is finally acknowledged that it is just that: divisive nonsense. But so many have bought into it that there can be no such acknowledgement without them losing face. We have to find some pragmatic way of allowing face saving or it isn’t going to happen.
Quite. It’s stuffed full of caveats which are clearly designed to give full flexibility to any and all healthcare settings to carry on as they are on one pretext or another.
What’s needed is for the government to order the NHS and it’s allied services such as GP practices to stop it, now.
But little chance of that happening!
This won’t make one iota of difference, it’s way too vague. Deliberately of course. My wife who works at a GP surgery just sent this to the practice manager who replied with “I interpret that to mean everyone should still keep wearing a mask to protect anyone that might be immunosuppressed”.
People have completely lost their heads and they won’t find them anytime soon.
If we were required to protect immunosuppressed people, why historically did we ever leave our homes? Some people are allergic to sunlight so it’s critical that we all carry umbrellas in case we meet one, in a bikini, and there’s a sudden unexpected outbreak of sun…….
Went to collect a prescription yesterday from my local surgery,mid Norfolk and was overwhelmed by the number of mask wearing requirement notices that have appeared since last month.I walked in , waited and collected my prescription maskless with no comments or looks.
Pure theatre
Same in South Shropshire.
Let’s make the obvious point: the officious “Do This! Do That!”-ism of minor functionaries (“tinpot Hitlers”) has, in this instance, been so zealous, so extreme, that central administrators have had to step in and tell them to lay off a bit.
Watch this space.
It would be very interesting if a comparison could be made with other countries.
(Also: WTF is going on with British airports? How come it’s only Britain where “holidaymakers”, typically once-a-year flyers, are being messed about so much at the moment, with such long delays and so many cancelled flights?)
Actually, it’s not just the UK. For weeks now it’s been a mess at Amsterdam Schiphol airport, with people waiting in line outside, being in line for hours and still missing their flights, flights cancelled, etc.
The argument is that a lot of people were laid off or left during the years of hysteria and there’s a labour shortage in general, so that it’s hard to fill the vacancies. I’m somewhat dubious about that, just as I am about all the measures to make sure that come winter we all freeze and sit in the dark and soon will be on rations. The GreenLeft idiot leader has announced that greenhouse farmers will have be charged an additional energy tax – yep, food inflation is already harsh, definitely the thing to do.
My contempt for the medical trades grows daily. Have none of the buggers the balls to shout that masks are no bloody good? Or is it perhaps not their characters that are unsound but their intellects?
Can’t see anything to celebrate here. Individual infection control teams will continue to advise mask wearing and managers will happily accept that. Hospital acquired positive covid test is still around and it doesn’t matter that people are not actually ill. The figures terrify the managers and they need to look as if they are doing something. Despite that something obviously being useless.
I’m torn.
I want to be supportive and encouraging of the drones as they unmask, the ones who have been banging on about the vulnerable for two years now, but it seems necessary to point out to them that immunocompromised people still face more or less the same risks they ever have.
By their own logic, they are now the bad people they have accused the anti-maskers of being all along.
What about gloves for the money poxed
As another commenter pointed out: This updated guidance really means Everyone should wear a facemask all the time to limit the spread of COVID unless some authority designated for this purpose decides that they’re not necessary in some specific situation.
It also perpetuates the much more dangerous nonsense that Sars-CoV2 is inherently different from and much more dangerous than other endemic viruses. The people behind this may have lost a couple of battles in their pandemic crusade but they’re by no means convinced this means it would be over.
So in a nutshell, masks are now a permanent part of A&E. You will under these rules never see a reassuring smile from a nurse or doctor on arrival in hospital again. Will science ever return to the medical profession or are we stuck with ‘The Science’ for ever?
Do you know what I’ve just realised, I’m past caring. Its the staff I feel for. Zero exemptions permitted for clinic staff. Surely someone should take them to court and win for discrimination.
The NHS is on its knees, nearly dead and comes to the table late in the day. Too late I am afraid. They have lost the admiration and trust of the people it serves. Most of us realise the nhs in small letters is no longer fit for purpose, denied/ignored all the serious adverse events and deaths we are witnessing caused by the experimental biologicals, the mental and physical damages caused to old and young by LOCKDOWNS and masks. Many will never trust a nurse or GP from the NHS.
Presumably Doctor’s surgeries will carry out a local risk assessment before making a decision? I had a check up 3 weeks ago and the Dr. didnt insist I wear a mask at all. When I said I wouldnt be able to hear what she said while wearing her mask she swopped it for a clear visor. On leaving I had the misfortune to cross paths with a receptionist in the corridor. “Put your mask on”. I just ignored the useless jobsworth.