6. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: National Immunisation Programme for Wales

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:44 pm on 27 June 2023.

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Photo of Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Labour 4:44, 27 June 2023

Thanks very much. So, I can give you some details on the situation in relation to the spring booster in terms of figures. So, what we've had is the delivery of 277,000 booster vaccinations—that was up til 22 June—and that includes about 76 per cent of care home residents, and 71 per cent of people over the age of 75. What’s really good is that we have achieved that offer of a vaccine to 100 per cent of those eligible people, so it was there for them if they wanted it. They’re not bad figures. What we have found is that, every time we offer this, it goes down slightly. That seems to be the case across the rest of the United Kingdom. So, we’ve got to get the balance right, and we can’t do this without the public. There’s a danger of vaccination fatigue, so we’ve still got to keep this going, because it is the best protection for the individual and the NHS, so that’s why I think this new approach is so critical.

You asked about the one size fits all. Well, what’s clear is what’s right, perhaps, in a built-up urban area may be very different from a rural area, and that’s why there’s a recognition that it’s not right to have a one size fits all. Local health boards may want to respond differently, local communities may want to respond differently, and what we have, for example, with GPs, is that it’s up to GPs to what extent they want to get involved, and certainly what we do in relation to flu vaccinations is there’s an incentive for GPs to administer the flu vaccination. As far as possible, I think there are real opportunities here to co-deliver flu and COVID, but some of this will depend on timing and how we maximise the timing of the administration of the vaccine, so that we protect people at the time when the protection is most needed. There’s quite a lot of detail to work out here, and the logistics are not easy. That’s why we’ve got a really crack team on this who've really understood—they learned such a lot during the pandemic, and they’re now driving that through the whole vaccination system. So, that’s good.

Then the centralised procurement model: I think, again, what we learned from the COVID pandemic was that, actually, procuring that centrally meant that we knew exactly what was going on, who had the vaccinations, who didn’t have them, and we could work the system around that. The issue with flu vaccinations is quite often they’re procured by the GPs themselves, and sometimes they under-procure, and they have to come and ask us centrally to make up for it. So, we know we can do it now centrally. We’ve got a lot of faith and confidence in that system, and the point is that all of this is being done in partnership. It’s not being done to people; it’s being done with people, at all levels of government.

On misinformation, a key part of this is the digital shift that is going to happen. We’ve now got the NHS app, there’ll be an opportunity for people to see what vaccinations they had on the app, and there are real opportunities around that. I think having the safety of an NHS app that can be relied on, which has taken—. People keep asking me, ‘Why has it taken so long, this app?’ and I’ve been asking that, I can tell you—I’ve been asking that question as well. And some of it is because people need to be absolutely sure that they can rely on this, and that whatever they see on that app is reliable. So, that is a source of information for the future where people can go where they won’t be misinformed.

And just in terms of catch-up programmes, well, we’re doing much better on the catch-up programmes there are. I think if you look at the routine immunisations, we’ve got the six-in-one vaccine that children have when they’re very young, protecting against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, flu type B, hepatitis B—there’s a whole list here. What I’ll do, if you don’t mind, is I’ll get some information sent to you, so you get a sense of where we’re at on that catch-up programme.