Identifying and protecting vulnerable citizens

Identifying vulnerable citizens

At the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC)'s request we have continued to maintain the Shielded Patients List (SPL) following the pause of national shielding guidance on 01 April. The maintenance of the SPL ensures clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) patients can be rapidly identified if targeted support needs to be provided in the future (for example for further vaccinations or for new requirements for shielding).

Optimising the service

Progressing work to migrate the digital infrastructure supporting the SPL into the cloud. This will reduce the time required to produce the SPL and increases the resilience of the service.

DHSC has commissioned the SPL for a further 12 months and work now underway to optimise the service. Key areas of focus include reducing technical debt, improving the choices for patient correspondence, publishing more information about the patient population through dashboards, and working to ensure that any updates to the Q-COVID algorithm can be incorporated in the list.

Expanding the service

We are working with DHSC and other stakeholders to agree priorities for expanding the Coronavirus (COVID-19) risk assessment service.

DHSC commissioned NHS Digital to develop digital infrastructure to support a more sophisticated approach to identifying individuals with increased vulnerability to COVID-19. This infrastructure has been successfully used to prioritise around 1.7million people with increased risk from COVID-19 for vaccination as part of Cohort 6** and to provide clinicians with tools to facilitate their review of individual patients’ risk from COVID-19 (COVID-19 Clinical Risk Assessment Tool - NHS Digital). Progressing discussions about updating the QCovid risk calculator developed by Oxford University (to reflect improvements in understanding of factors that affect risk from COVID-19) and expanding the use of the service to devolved administrations (it is currently only in use in England),

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has defined Cohort 6 as people between the ages of 16 and 64 with underlying health conditions which put them at higher risk of serious disease and mortality from COVID-19.