Support delivery of vaccinations

In early November, NHS Digital took over responsibility from NHSX for the overall management of the technology and data workstream for NHS England's vaccinations programme.

We are responsible for all:

• systems
• services and data flows for cohort identification
• call and recall services
• booking systems
• pharmacy systems for vaccination event capture
• flow of data to GP records and Summary Care Records
• communications at new sites
• analytics
• reporting
• data dissemination to approved parties and cyber security of solutions

A programme team was created, responsibilities were transferred, new commercial arrangements were put in place and reporting into the central programme was established during November 2020, for go-live in December 2020.

We delivered the data architecture required for launch of COVID-19 vaccinations. 

These data flows include: 

• demographics data feeds for cohort management and call/recall (covering around 55m people)
• data flows between the multiple systems involved, such as National Immunisation Vaccination System (NIVS), Pinnacle, GP systems, the Summary Care Record system, the National Immunisation Management System (NIMS)
• pre-population of staff data into NIVS
• various management information (MI) and reporting feeds to parties including Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and medical research communities

We developed new services to manage identity-resolution issues, to ensure the highest possible fidelity of recording of vaccination events in personal health records.

We continued to provide data to support NHS England’s ongoing campaign to vaccinate around 25 million people against influenza.

We completed the development for the new service, ‘Book a coronavirus vaccination’, that will allow health and social care workers and qualifying citizens in England to book appointments at mass vaccination centres.

The service is made of 3 products:

• a staff-facing appointment management solution (Q-Flow)
• a citizen-facing booking service (hosted on NHS.UK)
• a staff-facing appointment check-in app 

We commenced end-to-end testing for all 3 products on 16 November 2020 and are on track for deployment when NHS England mobilises vaccination centres.

We mobilised resources to provide a comprehensive, but targeted, security assurance package across 3 distinct work streams:

• security assurance
• security remediation
• Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) onboarding

The current focus is to security assure critical components and onboard services and solutions into the CSOC cyber incident response process.

We have been working with NHS England to ensure that fast, secure connectivity is in place for around 1,200 Primary Care Network (PCN) vaccination sites and mass vaccination sites.

We've been identifying procurement routes for NHS England to order and procure fixed connectivity, where appropriate, for non-NHS PCN sites.

In addition to this, we've also been working with Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and telecoms providers to ensure prioritisation is given to fixed lined connectivity orders, installations and service support for vaccination sites.

We continued to enhance the NHS COVID-19 vaccine research registry with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).  

As of 4 December 2020, 360,000 people had registered an interest in being contacted for recruitment into vaccine trials and eligible volunteers continue to be invited to participate in trials with around 110,000 invitations sent to eligible volunteers across 3 trials (as of 8 December 2020).  

We are progressing applications from a further 3 trials, which are due to start recruiting in December 2020 or early January 2021.