This page contains information on the patient consent, record keeping and data submission requirements for the flu vaccination service.

Patient consent

As with the provision of any pharmacy service, the patient must consent to being vaccinated.

The General Pharmaceutical Council’s Guidance on Consent provides information on consent for pharmacists and their teams.

Prior to vaccination, consent must be sought from each patient.  This consent should cover the administration of the vaccine as well as advising the patient of information sharing that will take place for the appropriate recording of the vaccination in their GP practice record.

The patient should also be informed that information relating to their vaccination may be shared with NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSE&I) and the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) as part of post-payment verification (PPV).

Patient consent can be obtained verbally and should be recorded in the pharmacy’s clinical record for the service. From September 2020, the requirement for a patient to sign a consent form was removed from the service requirements.

National Flu Vaccination Record Form

Contractors must maintain appropriate records to ensure effective ongoing service delivery.

The minimum requirements for the information which should be included in a contractor’s record of provision of the service to a patient are the mandatory sections indicated within the National Flu Vaccination Record Form which is included in the service specification (standalone copes of the form are available below).

Contractors can use this form to maintain their record of service delivery or the information can be recorded on an alternative form or in another way, such as an electronic system.

The eligible patient groups in 2021/22 have changed, so it is therefore important to discard any previously printed versions of the Flu Vaccination record forms from previous years and ensure that the new form is used.

National Flu Vaccination Record Form 2021/22 (v2 29th September 2021) (Word)

National Flu Vaccination Record Form 2021/22 (v2 29th September 2021) (PDF)

IT support for the service and sharing of data

In many areas, NHSE&I regional teams arrange IT support for the service; contact your LPC to find out whether that is the case in your area.

Where IT support is not available, contractors will instead be able to use a paper-based record keeping system.

Data recorded via electronic clinical records systems may be shared with the NHSBSA as part of normal payment arrangements. An application programming interface (API) has been developed to facilitate transfer of this data into the NHSBSA’s Manage Your Service (MYS) platform to improve payment claim accuracy. PharmOutcomes and Sonar Informatics currently utilise this API.

The core dataset transmitted by the API is:

Date of administration
Pharmacy ODS code
Patient name
Patient date of birth
Patient NHS number
Patient address (including postcode)
Patient’s GP ODS code, practice name and address (including postcode)
Name of vaccine administered

Data collection regarding vaccines administered to primary care contractors and their staff

On 29th September 2021, NHSE&I announced that they had secured additional funding to support provision of flu vaccinations to frontline primary care staff during the 2021/22 flu season.

Read more about this announcement

Contractors need to keep a manual record of the number of primary care staff they vaccinate in the service (in addition to their normal clinical records for the service).

This data should separately count the number of staff vaccinated from each of the four contractor groups, with it being reported each month on the NHSBSA’s Manage Your Service (MYS) platform in a new module, which will be linked to from the main MYS flu vaccination module.

Given the timing of the agreement to fund these vaccinations, it was too late for the main MYS flu vaccination module to be amended to include this data capture.

PSNC has published a tally chart for contractors to use to keep a manual count of the number of staff from each primary care setting they have vaccinated each month.

Clinical records for this group of patients should be kept as usual, with claims for the vaccinations administered being recorded under the ‘Frontline health and social care staff’ category in the main MYS flu vaccination module (the separate manual data collection is just for evaluation purposes and this data will not affect the claim for payment).

Return to the flu vaccination hub page