September 2021

Seasonal Influenza update September 2021 - England only

Important - If you are administering Influenza & COVID vaccines together please use one of the national vaccination systems. This is to ensure the data flow for COVID continues as per national guidance.

Recording Influenza vaccinations in Practice

There have been some changes introduced in England with regards to recording vaccinations. These changes affect the following areas:

Recording Influenza vaccinations for Specific Unregistered Patients in Practice

For the first time the Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Programme Enhanced Service Specification 2021/22 enables practices to administer an Influenza vaccination to the following unregistered patients:

  • Front-line health and social care staff employed by a registered residential care or nursing home, or a voluntary managed hospice provider.
  • Those living in either:
    • Long-stay facilities
    • Nursing homes
    • Other long-stay health or social care facilities
  • Housebound patients

To record the influenza vaccination:

  1. From the Vision 3 front screen, select Registration and then register the patient as an Immediately Necessary Treatment patient. See Adding an Immediately Necessary Treatment Patient for details if required.
    Note - The Immediately Necessary Treatment registration status is simply being used for administrative purposes to create a patient record for the Influenza vaccination only. This does not obligate your practice to provide immediately necessary treatment to patients not registered with the practice that they are administering an Influenza vaccination to.
  2. Record the vaccination in the usual way. See Delivering the Vaccine for more information.

Important - To ensure the correct payment, you must record vaccinations for these patients in line with this guidance.

Qualifying vaccinations recorded for Immediately Necessary Treatment patients are extracted via a one-off end of season GPES extraction and payments are made within the financial year.

Note - You can still claim reimbursement for Influenza vaccinations administered to unregistered patients as before by submitting FP34 forms to the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA).

For practices using Vision 3 the record of the vaccination is automatically transferred to the patient’s registered GP practice via NHS Digital’s Data Processing Service.

Note - The registration of Immediately Necessary Treatment patients is not supported in the shared versions of Vision Anywhere or Vision 360. For payment purposes please ensure to record vaccinations of unregistered patients in Vision 3

For practices using Vision Anywhere mobile where patients have been registered via Vision 3, you can record influenza vaccinations as this information is then written back to your system and will be included in your claims.

Pregnant Patients

Where an influenza vaccination is administered because a patient is pregnant, you must provide a clinical indication of pregnancy, for example a Read code of 62…00 Patient pregnant within the last 9 months.

See Finding a Read Code for more information. 

Note - Pregnancy is not indicated under the ES by the recording of the Read code 1513.00 Last menstrual period – 1st day.

Payment for Practices - Reminder

To ensure payment is made correctly and in a timely manner, the correct clinical terms must be recorded.

For more details on recording Influenza vaccinations in practice, see Delivering the Vaccine

Note - Patient records that are not marked as ‘In Practice’ or ‘In this practice’ are not included for payment. The following clinical terms are included in the GPES extraction, however they are also not included for payment as they indicate an out of practice vaccination:

  • Influenza OHP codes.
  • Influenza Pharmacist codes.

    NHS Digital daily Influenza extract

    To support the 2021-22 Influenza campaign, a daily extract of all Influenza vaccination data is sent to NHS Digital, including Immediately Necessary Patient data. This is to ensure the flow of data to the patient's Registered GP.

    Note: We are currently working with NHS Digital on an import collating all Influenza vaccination data recorded outside of General Practice (Including Immediately Necessary Treatment patients), Pinnacle and Sonar data. This will mean you are no longer required to input the data manually from PDF. You will be advised via blog when this is available. 

     

    See our Seasonal Influenza Help Centre for more information.