The National Audit Office (NAO) has praised the delivery of new digital tools in the NHS as part of the roll out of the Covid-19 vaccination programme.
It is part of a generally positive report that says the programme met stretching and unprecedented targets in saving lives and reducing serious illness and hospitalisation.
The report points out that NHS England and Improvement and NHS Digital created new digital tools to support the vaccine deployment, making effective use of imperfect existing data.
The programme set up a national integrated data system, making use of the existing national immunisation management system that allowed the NHS to identify, record and transmit all patient vaccination data, including vaccination status, across the health and care system for the first time.
This included the ‘point of care’ system, where details about the individual and type of vaccination administered were recorded when people were vaccinated.
While some priority groups – such as the social care workforce and unpaid carers – were hard to identify from their main GP records, but NHS England made creative use of other data sources to improve identification.
Effective booking system
NHS Digital also set up a national online booking system, primarily for vaccination centres and community pharmacies, which stakeholders told the NAO was generally an effective innovation that helped to expand convenient access. However, some found that a lack of flexibility (for example, difficulty in cancelling bookings) and the lack of a single booking system for all types of location made it difficult for some sites to manage their workload.
NHS Digital continued to make changes to the booking system over time and took what it described as a modular approach, building on existing systems to quickly set up the system for the vaccination programme. It has subsequently developed this into a streamlined template, which it is considering using in other vaccination programmes.
More broadly, the vaccine roll out was the biggest and most complex vaccination programme in UK history, and in line with its targets two-thirds of adults had been vaccinated by 19 July 2021. Securing the supply of vaccines early and then maintaining it was crucial to the successful roll out, the report says.
Head of the NAO Gareth Davies said: “The vaccine programme has been successful in getting early access to what were brand new Covid-19 vaccines, securing supply of them, and administering them to a large proportion of the population at unprecedented speed.
“The programme must now redouble its efforts to reach those who are not yet vaccinated while also considering what a more sustainable model will involve as it moves out of its emergency phase.”
