Doctors are concerned that certain groups in Sheffield are opting to not have the vaccine
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Health chiefs say there are small groups who are not getting vaccinated and they are also concerned about the take up once it is rolled out to younger people.
Dr Ollie Hart told councillors at a meeting: “We definitely find little pockets of groups that aren’t taking it up, some of the Somali population and some of the Pakistani population particularly, and some other little pockets.
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Hide Ad“Your help working with the community to reassure them that it’s safe would be really helpful.”
Dr Zak McMurray, medical director of Sheffield Clinical Commissioning Group, said: “As far as different ethnic groups are concerned, it doesn’t appear to be a major issue apart from within the Afro Caribbean population, this seems to be a bit of an issue.
“It’s really important that we keep the message out there, that we encouraged different groups to come to get vaccines and we use different methods of doing that, whether it’s pop up vaccine centres or engaging with local elders within populations, within religious groups.
“So far it’s not been a major issue but I think it will be as you get further down cohorts, I suspect probably the younger age groups will be more of an issue.
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Hide Ad“It’s really important that we encourage people who have doubts to have the conversation, you can alleviate some of the doubts quite quickly.”
Director of Public Health Greg Fell said there wasn’t good data about the BAME population as it was based on the census from 10 years ago.
He added: “The soft intelligence pretty consistently is that the uptake is much better than expected amongst the elderly Asian groups, I think we’ll need to do some work as we get further down the age cohorts.
“The Black African population is the key concern and we’re doing lots of work to address the concerns that people have and make the vaccine as easily accessible as possible but there is more work to do.”