DETAILS were today unveiled of how all of the Stoke-on-Trent population will be called in for swine flu jabs starting in the autumn.

Days after a vaccine is scheduled for release in September by the Department of Health, the city's 55 GP practices will contact patients with long-standing conditions to become the first protected.

Health workers will be next in line so key services are protected from being ripped apart by staff calling in sick with the pandemic.

Then the rest of the city's 240,000 population will be covered in an unprecedented mass vaccination programme lasting around six months and described by Potteries health experts as "an immense task".

Similar plans are being worked on in Newcastle, the Staffordshire Moorlands and South Cheshire – but Stoke-on-Trent Primary Care Trust is the first to publicly announce them.

PCT officials have also warned that the forecast swine flu onslaught this winter will leave local healthcare so stretched that Whitehall will let them suspend traditional NHS targets such as treatment waiting lists and cancelled operations.

They are using the coming weeks to ensure as much pre-planning is completed ready for the vaccine going live.

Public health director Dr Giri Rajaratnam said: "We need to protect the whole city. So it is vital we reach as many as the population as possible and that will mean us having a programme that is bigger and quicker than anything seen before."

An additional pressure is that consent forms will need to be signed on behalf of children and those unable to give their own consent.

The cost of the vaccine – together with the Tamiflu treatment which has already been handed out – is being picked up by Government.

But the PCT itself will have to find the million pound-plus sum its finance department estimates will be needed to carry out the immunisation and cover for staff off sick.

Around 40 staff have so far been taken off their normal duties to work full-time on the project and the Department of Health has told the trust to make contingency plans for between 20 per cent to half the workforce being off ill at the same time.

City health managers are already preparing a list of storage points for the vaccine and working on the speediest ways of transferring it to surgeries and other vaccination centres such as care homes and hospital premises.

They are also identifying how many vaccinators are on the pay-roll – predominantly doctors, nurses and health visitors – before deciding whether they will need to train up more to cope with the huge numbers expected to come forward.

In a briefing to the PCT board, Dr Rajaratnam said: "The public should not lose sight of the fact that swine flu is a very mild illness and numbers needing hospital treatment locally are still very low.

"Nevertheless, people who have it must take great care by staying at home for seven days and making sure they own a thermometer to check their temperature.

"The current infection rate in Stoke-on-Trent is 170 suspected cases per 100,000 of the population and we expect that to fall for a few weeks during the holidays before the next surge in October or November.

"But we have got to plan for the worst to support health and council staff trying to keep services running.

"We also need to be courageous enough to say that some of our targets and objectives will have to be delayed to protect mainstream services for people with other illnesses.

"Our financial plans and general performance may also have to be modified if demand on services from swine flu starts to increase."

The city is distributing Tamiflu from a number of points including 10 chemists and a collection centre which opened in South Wall Street this week.

But Dr Rajaratnam said there was growing evidence that many people collecting the drugs were not actually using them.

He added: "There are common side effects with these anti-virals which can be worse than the symptoms of the flu itself.

"As people are becoming more aware of this, they are deciding not to go ahead and take the drug after it has been collected for them.

"The message therefore is that you don't have to arrange to pick up Tamiflu if you have only mild symptoms."

The PCT is worried that some isolated people with the disease cannot find a so-called flu friend to collect the drug for them so it is planning a system to solve that problem.

Typical symptoms of swine flu include a temperature of 38C, a sudden cough and possibly a headache, tiredness, chills, aching muscles, limb or joint pain, upset stomach, sore throat, runny nose, sneezing or loss of appetite.