A piece in today’s Sunday Times. Many people will have been misled by the paper’s headline into thinking the person in question is a man – “NHS manager ‘jumped queue’ to get jab meant for frontline workers”.
A senior manager in the NHS has been accused of jumping the vaccine queue after booking herself in for a Covid jab despite falling outside the priority groups.
Diane Baynham, who leads a team at NHSX, the health service’s digital arm, is understood to have received the vaccine last week.
While she works for the NHS, she does not deal with patients, and she is understood to have been working from home. At 49, she is not in an age group that makes her eligible for a vaccine.
It is understood Baynham, who lives in Nottinghamshire, drove to her local hospital on Sunday evening to see whether any vaccines were spare. When told there were none, she said she was an NHS worker and booked a jab the next day.
“Is there a VIP lane for some NHS staff to get the vaccine?” asked a source. “Diane didn’t fall into any priority category to get the vaccine. That’s someone else’s space she’s taken.”
Under-50s are not likely to be invited for a vaccine until autumn. In response to a question last week over whether queue-jumpers should be fined, the home secretary, Priti Patel, said it was “morally reprehensible” to skip the queue.
A source close to Baynham said she was a “decent and dedicated person” and had gone to the hospital and booked a vaccination on the understanding that otherwise a dose would be wasted.
NHS England said: “No one has been vaccinated as a result of working for NHSX.”
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