NHS England is set to ‘test’ using health visitors to administer childhood flu vaccinations and other routine immunisations.
The move has been announced within the new NHS urgent and emergency care plan 2025/26, published today.
Backed by almost £450m investment, the plan promises to ‘expand’ urgent and emergency care facilities, reduce A&E wait times and push more urgent treatment into the community.
Looking at prevention, the plan sets out steps being taken to ‘reduce demand’ for urgent care later in the year, including through vaccinations.
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NHS England said that regions would be working with integrated care boards (ICBs) on how they can ‘strengthen’ the childhood vaccination offer.
‘Increasing vaccine uptake among children is one of the most impactful interventions, with every thousand childhood vaccinations saving around four hospital admissions,’ the plan noted.
As a minimum, NHS England asked for these plans to set out how:
- GPs and school-aged immunisation providers will increase vaccination rates, working with local directors of public health
- Local campaigns will target those in clinical risk groups
Alongside this, NHS England said it will ask ‘some systems to test the use of health visitors to administer childhood flu vaccinations and other routine immunisations for eligible children’.
‘These systems will test the feasibility and value for money of different approaches and provide evidence to inform national roll-out from 2026/27,’ it added.
In a Health and Social Care Committee meeting held this week, chief executive of the Institute of Health Visiting (iHV), Alison Morton, discussed a separate project that was underway between NHS England and the UK Health Security Agency on exploring the use of health visitors in vaccinations.
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Ms Morton said the ‘pathfinder project’ had started in December 2024 and was underway to find areas where health visitors can help increase vaccination uptake and try to reach families ‘who have fallen out of the system’.
‘We believe health visitors have a crucial role to play, because they have that trusted relationship with families,’ she told the influential committee of MPs.
‘Part of the role is to promote vaccination uptake, but also to actually administer vaccines for those families, for whatever reason, find it difficult to reach the normal services.’
The iHV said it understood this was a different project to that announced today in the urgent and emergency care plan.
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The urgent and emergency care plan also committed to ‘expanding’ the use of the National Booking Service for flu vaccination ‘to make more appointments available, including keeping it open until the end of the flu campaign in March’.
And it also pledged to develop a ‘flu walk-in finder’ for patients to ‘easily look up’ when they can walk into a community pharmacy for a vaccination, from October 2025.
