Flu Service Update - Vaccination Numbers, Pharmoutcomes and Advertising

The LPC hopes you are now well in the swing of providing flu vaccinations to your patients and customers. 

In Cumbria and North East (CaNE), just under 20,000 vaccinations have been administered to date. This compares to 41,282 administered across last year’s entire service. Pharmacies are doing a great job so far at engaging patients into the service. One pharmacy in Cumbria LPC Area  has nearly hit 1000 vaccinations alone!.

Closer to home approximately 2000 vaccinations have been done in our area (1000 in Gateshead, 600 in Sunderland and 400 in South Tyneside)  with with one of our pharmacies having done nearly 200. 

Hopefully this gives you an insight to compare your self against colleagues as we are aware that with the national service this year, you do not currently have sight of how you’re performing compared to other pharmacies.
 
The LPC would encourage you to record your vaccinations on PharmOutcomes as in previous years. The system will collate your data and provide you with a claim at the end of the month to submit to the NHS BSA. In addition, if you are able to access the service live in your consultation room, you can record the consultation, then print the consent form for the patient to sign. No more having to complete consent forms by hand and have copies available ready. At busier times, it may be more effective to have patients complete a hard copy whilst you’re with another patient but ideally, you will complete the consultation online. 
 
This data collection is essential to collate the evidence to provide to NHS England to support commissioning again next year. At this point, the service has been commissioned for 2015-16. There is no agreement that this will be an ongoing service, such as MUR and NMS. The national data is showing that pharmacy is accessing those patients who do not generally go to their GP for vaccination, i.e. the clinical risk groups aged under 65 years. Without your data input to PharmOutcomes, we are missing vital data to support PSNC in negotiating the service for next year.
 
One of the major advantages of using PharmOutcomes is also the electronic notification to GP practices when you vaccinate a patient. The LPC's accrues the region obtained email addresses for GP practices and these were been passed to Pinnacle Health for uploading to PharmOutcomes. PharmOutcomes then sent an automated email to the practice which required validation. The LPC again contacted all practices via the CCG to advise them that the email was coming and that they needed to validate their email address within seven days.
 
If you are receiving bounce back messages from PharmOutcomes advising that there is no valid email address, please your LPC contact below know so we can work further to encourage practices to validate their addresses.

North of Tyne LPC Area -  [email protected]
Gateshead South Tyneside and Sunderland LPC Area - [email protected]
Co-Durham and Darlington LPC Area - [email protected]
Tees LPC Area - [email protected]
Cumbria LPC Area - [email protected]
 
When a practice notification is sent via PharmOutcomes, the practice receives a copy of the consent form as a pdf, which they can save directly to the patient’s record. This saves the practice time in having to retype the information from a hard copy notification into the patient record. If practices ask you about the electronic notification, please advise them of the benefit and encourage them to validate their email address.
 
Gateshead & South Tyneside LPC has worked with neighbouring LPC's (Sunderland, North of Tyne and Co. Durham and Darlington) on a package of advertising to support the flu service.  You may already have heard the flu vaccination radio advert again on Metro Radio. The advertising started on Monday and will run for four weeks. However, in addition, this year, there will be print media adverts, bus sides and backs, social media adverts and online press adverts. A sample of the advert material is above for your information and the flu advert can be heard on last years advert page

Don't forget if you do require any support with providing the service, please do get in touch. or Visit the PSNC flu web page.