The NHS Immunisation Management Service supports the enhanced winter flu programme and the national COVID-19 vaccination programme by supporting and optimising the uptake of vaccinations for the nation.
Optimising immunisation uptake at a national and local level
We provide a National Immunisation Management System (NIMS, described below) supported by a comprehensive service into the national vaccination programme. Working as a key partner of the wider national programme, commissioned by NHS England, the NHS Immunisations Management Service is:
- Sending national letters, emails or SMS messages to invite and remind individuals to book their vaccinations. This is aligned to the invitation service already operated by GP practices and Primary Care Networks.
- Providing a regional support and improving immunisation uptake service using operational data to show uptake, and analysis using data such as age, deprivation and ethnicity and identifying outliers. This service can drill down to GP practice level if needed and provides evidence for national and local campaign planning. Feedback so far shows this is having a great benefit to local planning and providing a focus on where uptake needs to be improved.
- Providing an outbound call centre, which uses analysis gathered by the immunisation uptake team on vaccination data from NIMs, identifies areas of low uptake and makes follow-up outbound telephone calls to those who haven't been vaccinated.
This outbound call centre service identifies the perceived and actual barriers people are experiencing in accessing the vaccination and seeks to mitigate this through answering queries or signposting, and can be targeted to specific CCGs, across PCNs or to individual GP practices. Regional comments reports are produced to capture this data and can be filtered to CCG level. The information can be shared with stakeholders to inform and improve the delivery of vaccination.
National Immunisation Management System
NIMS is the IT software and infrastructure that supports the programme.
- A single datastore holding vaccination records, demographics and booking transactions for more than 60m people, in near real-time.
- A call and recall service that can identify groups of eligible individuals according to clinical priority using the JCVI guidance. This service can use mail, email and text messaging and uses the latest patient and vaccination data to ensure that the eligible patients are invited. The service can also support the recall of people who have not taken up their offer of the first or second dose.
- A reporting and analytics package which allows vaccination activity to be analysed in near real-time.
- Dashboards for analytics to increase immunisation uptake and manage local vaccination programmes. Reports can be produced on demographic influencers such as deprivation, ethnicity and age. Data is captured at regional, CCG and GP practice level.
This work builds on our existing successful child health immunisation services, transforming and improving vaccination uptake.
The NHS SCW service is currently operating with the flu and the COVID-19 vaccination programmes. Read our case study: Delivering an immunisation management service for the NHS flu programme.
Sharing best practices
Following a request from NHS England for feedback from GP Practices, Primary Care Networks and Clinical Commissioning Groups that achieved a high flu vaccination uptake in 2020/21, the SCW Immunisation Management Service (IMS) regional teams collated the best practices from across all seven NHSE/I regions. Winter flu vaccination programme best practices.
For more information on the Immunisation Management Service or optimising immunisation uptake, please contact SCW Immunisation Management Services Director, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
