Pharmacy will not be ‘core offer’ for childhood vaccinations, minister says

The Government does not want to use community pharmacy as part of the ‘core offer’ for childhood vaccinations, a minister has said.

Speaking at a House of Lords Childhood Vaccinations Committee evidence session earlier this week, public health minister Sharon Hodgson said this is because there is not enough evidence that this will improve vaccine uptake.

Ms Hodgson told the committee: ‘We don’t currently want to use [community pharmacy] as the core offer for children because it has a lot of other things to do, but also because we don’t yet know whether the evidence suggests that it’s really effective.

‘What we think community pharmacy is particularly good at is delivering catch-up vaccines, for example among adults or teenagers.

‘This is partly because of the versatility of the sector, and partly because they have been very willing to participate.’

Ms Hodgson gave the example that community pharmacy will be delivering the new one-off meningitis B (MenB) vaccination programme for young people.

The Government has also announced that from October pharmacies will also be able to offer flu vaccinations to children who missed the opportunity to be vaccinated in school.

Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) director general of global, public health and emergencies, Catherine Frances, told the committee that GPs remain the ‘real central part of the system’ because they hold vaccination records and can follow children throughout their lives.

During the evidence sessions, Ms Hodgson also committed to a national communication programme to counter vaccine misinformation.

The public health minister said this may include working with Google and other digital platforms to ensure that trusted NHS sources appear in AI-style summaries, ‘pre-bunking’ misinformation around vaccines on social media.

Ms Hodgson also said that politicians should be careful how they speak about vaccines.

‘Immunisations will save children’s lives so there needs to be a level of responsibility that politicians of all parties have to be cognisant of when they’re talking about this,’ she added.

The panel, which also included NHS England’s director of vaccination Caroline Temmink, told the committee that the government’s intention is not just to increase vaccine uptake, but to narrow deprivation gaps.

They also acknowledged that high uptake in deprived areas is more resource‑intensive and costly due to the need for outreach and community engagement work.

Ms Frances said: ‘It’s often more expensive if you’re having to flex your systems more, or put more services on to accommodate for the fact that somebody has three jobs and can only get to you at certain points of the day, or is juggling lots of kids and it’s really hard to get in.’

A version of this article was first published by Pulse’s sister title The Pharmacist