Vaccination

Use these integrations to provide vaccination information to us.

You can send us information relating to:

• coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccinations
• COVID-19 extended data attributes
• COVID-19 hourly vaccination aggregate data for the NHS Foundry
• seasonal flu vaccinations
• measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccinations

These integrations specify the flow of vaccination-related information from healthcare settings including:

• hospital hubs - NHS providers vaccinating on site 

• local vaccine services – community or primary care led services which could include primary care facilities, retail, community facilities, temporary structures or roving teams 

• vaccination centres – large sites such as sports and conference venues set up for high volumes of people 

These integrations use MESH to send and receive pipe-delimited (|) and not-sign-delimited (¬) files.

For more details on how to interact with end users to collect COVID-19 information safely, see the functional specifications under 'Additional guidance'.

For FHIR standards relating to the flow of information directly back to the patient's GP, see Digital Medicine - FHIR.

For FHIR standards relating to the flow of information to other care providers such as Child Health, see Vaccination Events - FHIR.

These integrations can only be used where there is a legal basis to do so. Make sure you have a valid use case before you go too far with your development, by contacting us.

You must do this before you can go live (see ‘Onboarding’ below). 

The following APIs and integrations are also related to these integrations :

• Vaccination Adverse Reactions COVID-19 - use this to provide information on adverse reactions relating to coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccinations.
• Vaccination Events - FHIR - use this to send and receive messages about changes to a patient's vaccination details.
• Digital Medicine - FHIR - use this to notify a patient's registered GP practice of care services provided by a pharmacy, such as immunisation.

These integrations are in production.

These integrations uses MESH which is a silver service, meaning it is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year but only supported during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

For more details, see service levels.

These integrations consist of delimited files you send to us over MESH.

Some are pipe-delimited (|), others are not-sign-delimited (¬) files. For details, see the individual specification.

These integrations are available on the internet and on the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).

For more details see Network access for APIs.

These integrations use MESH which is an application-restricted API.

These integrations do not perform any end user authentication or authorisation checks. Rather, the calling system is expected to perform them. 

These integrations use MESH.

As a developer, you are most likely to want to connect to MESH using either the MESH client or the MESH API.

For more details about using the MESH client, see MESH client.

For the MESH API, there are several independent, externally accessible instances of MESH you can use for testing. For full details, see MESH API - Environments and testing.

You must get your software onboarded before it can go live.

For more details, contact us at [email protected].