A FREE meal will be offered to staff at York Hospital if they have a flu vaccination.

After successfully vaccinating more than three quarters of its staff last year, York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will again give staff meal vouchers if they get a flu jab.

The motivation behind the scheme is for the trust to secure £500,000 if 70 per cent of its frontline staff are vaccinated.

This would be a welcome boost to the trust’s funds after it ran out of money last month and was forced to rely on an emergency loan.

It had to enter the Foundation Trust Distressed Cash regime after posting a deficit of £13.8 million.

The loan will see the trust incur interest on the re-payments and further increase its costs and loans.

The plans to give out the flu jab at clinics were revealed to staff in their monthly newsletter.

It read: “The clinics are scheduled to maximise protection against the virus and minimise disruption to services and staff.

“Last year a meal voucher was provided after vaccination and this will be offered once again.”

Writing in the newsletter, Karen O’Connell, operations lead for the Occupational Health and Wellbeing Service, said: “Vaccination clinics worked very well last year, the majority of colleagues attended them for vaccination.

“Clinics were central and efficient with staff being registered, vaccinated and discharged within five minutes.

“Importantly, thanks to the participation of so many staff, the trust was able to increase our vaccine uptake from 46.5 per cent in December 2015 to 69 per cent by the end of December 2016.”

This year’s flu vaccine has been developed to combat a strain of the virus which affected people in the southern hemisphere during their winter.

Hospitals are under pressure to make sure their staff are protected after Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, claimed more people would get the flu this winter, piling more work on GP services and hospitals.

A spokeswoman for York Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said: “Nationally, a proportion of healthcare providers’ income is conditional on demonstrating certain improvements in quality and innovation in specified areas of patient care, and flu vaccination is one of those.

“The indicative value to the trust is £500,000 if 70 per cent of frontline staff are vaccinated.

“This is a national scheme and therefore applies to all trusts.

“Annually the flu vaccine programme is a critical element of our approach in terms of managing winter pressures.

“It helps to reduce unplanned admissions within the local community and pressures on our emergency department.

“Protection against flu helps reduce sickness absence levels in staff so that services are able to continue operating throughout the winter period.”