Children's immunisation teams are extremely busy visiting schools in their local area ensuring that as many young people as possible are protected from flu this winter.

This year, the flu programme has been extended to include all children aged 2 to 15.

However, what provision is in place for children who don’t attend a school setting? For example, home school children, clinically vulnerable children or children who live with someone with serious underlying health conditions.

Increasing access to vaccinations

It’s critical that these children have the same level of access to the flu vaccination as other children.

According to recent BBC research, the number of children being home-schooled is increasing each year. More than 40,000 pupils in the UK were taken out of school formally between September 2020 and April 2021, compared with an average of 23,000 over the previous two years.

In August 2021, over 55,000 clinically extremely vulnerable children were asked to stop shielding and return to school. Whilst some families followed this advice, many have reported feeling great anxiety about this decision and have decided to keep their children at home.

Choose and book at a community clinic

RIVIAM has developed and added new functionality to our Digital Immunisations Consent service to ensure that these groups of children can still access their flu vaccination should they wish to.

Parents can now easily complete an online consent form and book an appointment for their child to attend a community clinic. They will have the added convenience of choosing the location, date and time.

New bookable functionality

Bookable appointments will make it easier for immunisation teams to manage the number of children who can attend the community clinics and plan in advance the types of flu vaccine that will be required at that clinic.

Maximising uptake

Giving parents a choice of clinics where their child can have the flu immunisation should increase the uptake and help ensure that this large cohort of children is not missed from the immunisation programme.

Each child will have a single vaccination record on RIVIAM alongside any immunisation programmes they have participated in in the past. Clinicians can refer to these records and extract useful data whilst reporting outcomes. They will be able to see which children have received immunisations and identify cohorts where they may need to focus their efforts to maximise uptake.

Get in touch

The bookable service functionality can be added to any of our customer's immunisation programmes, including for COVID-19.

If you are new to RIVIAM and would like to understand more about our immunisations service, please get in touch and we will be happy to discuss your requirements with you.