Fears there could be delays in vaccinating teenage girls in Kent against cervical cancer are being dispelled by those administering the drug here.

Questions have been raised nationally over whether there are enough nurses to carry out the immunisations.

In England alone around 300,000 12- to 13-year-old girls will receive the jab.

The vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted infection which causes many cases of cervical cancer and is expected to save around 400 lives a year.

In Kent, nurses from GP surgeries will go into secondary schools.

A KCC spokesman told Kentonline: “Vaccinations will be carried out by specialist health teams in schools, and will initially be for girls in year 8 and 13, with catch-up programmes for other girls under 18 in subsequent years.”

Kent’s director of Public Health, Meradin Peachey, said: “In uninfected girls, the vaccine is 99 per cent effective against the two types of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) that cause almost 75 per cent of cases of cervical cancer."

Sutton Valence School, a co-educational independent school for both boarders and day pupils in Maidstone, has two nurses based on campus.

Marketing manager, Helen Knott, said "both nurses will be trained in the very near future and will be able to cope with the numbers of pupils boarding."

Although their in-house nurses will only deal with boarders, Ms Knott said local GP surgeries would be expected to deal with the non-boarders and they are "not anticipating any problems."

Jane Bennett, head teacher of Clarendon House Grammar School in Ramsgate, which is a single sex school for girls from Years 7 to 11, said: "All schools that have girl pupils should embrace this idea of an inoculation against the virus that causes cervical cancer, which can prove fatal. It is another way of protecting young women, in the same way that well-structured and informative sexual health and relationship education does.

"Anything that can prevent this illness is worthy of support."

Mrs Bennett said that the Department of Health information literature about the programme will be distributed to pupils when the initiative gets under way.

For information visit www.immunisation.nhs.uk