Early intervention works - but there is a short-term cost

Once again, the cliche that early intervention works, but that the savings come much later than the initial spending has been demonstrated. The NHS wants to expand the flu vaccination to all children and young people aged between two and 17 is good news. Even a 30% uptake is predicted to save perhaps 2,000 lives a year, lead to 11,000 fewer hospital admissions and vast savings in NHS budgets.

But even when the NHS will make the savings, it can't easily identify the budget to increase the number of school nurses by 1,000 - the estimated number needed to administer the two doses each child needs in October and November.

The existing school nurse workforce is already stretched in delivering the basics of the Healthy Child programme. So the government is considering using parents and teachers trained by nurses - what you might call para-nurses. I'm not against that, personally, provided that a trained nurse is available on-site whenever the vaccine is being administered. So by all means keep the costs down, but don't allow the up-front costs to put the entire intervention programme at risk!