NHS Health Scotland will be hosting three regional events in March on transforming vaccination services.

Responsibility for vaccination services in Scotland is transferring from general practice and primary care to the wider NHS workforce as part of the primary care transformation programme.

The events are being held to ‘support a wide range of stakeholders to build knowledge and understanding of the vital importance of vaccination as a public health issue in protecting our communities from the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases’.

Participants will hear of progress made during the vaccination transformation programme’s (VTP) first year, alongside plans for the coming year.

The Aberdeen event takes place on Wednesday 13^th March, before the Edinburgh meeting on Monday 18^th and the Glasgow meeting on Thursday 28^th.

Flexibility key for immunisation strategies, report finds

The announcement precedes Health Scotland reviewing different approaches to boosting engagement with immunisation programmes in groups that are traditionally difficult-to-reach.

The review found ‘little evidence’ to support a single approach to promoting immunisation programmes.

To support Scotland’s vaccination transformation programme, the public health body undertook a rapid evidence review to identify interventions to improve engagement with underserved groups.

Underserved populations are groups of individuals from any ethnic background who, due to social circumstances or disability, language, culture or lifestyle, find it difficult to access health  care and services.

They often experience significant health inequalities and are populations that vaccination services still find difficult to engage with, leading to under vaccinated groups that suffer an increased risk of vaccine-preventable diseases.

People from deprived areas, those whose first language is not English, those with learning disabilities, and members of Gypsy/Traveller communities were some of groups covered by the report.

The report concludes the evidence base related to interventions to improve vaccination rates is underdeveloped.

Of the 1,149 studies carried out in this area since 2013, the report’s authors focused on 20 individual research reports, concluding that a range of approaches should be adopted to suit local populations, rather than one single approach being adopted to promote immunisation across the board.

Effective approaches among people whose first language is not English included using non-clinical ‘trusted community settings’, such as churches and consulates, as potential locations for implementing interventions to improve vaccination rates.

While social marketing among parents to raise awareness of immunisation in deprived areas had ‘modest effects’, the report concluded:

‘Prenatal and postpartum periods were used as opportunities to improve vaccination uptake among deprived mothers and their infants.’