Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to (a) promote and (b) improve access to the Winter 2020-21 influenza vaccine.

NHS England and NHS Improvement are working with local areas to ensure that regional teams have plans in place to increase coverage of the flu vaccination this winter. New models of delivery have been shared with regional commissioning teams to encourage innovative thinking such as mobile and mass vaccination models to allow for increases in uptake safely whilst observing social distancing and personal protective equipment requirements.

NHS England and NHS Improvement will be introducing an enhanced call and recall system so that those who are eligible are reminded to attend a vaccination session alongside better mechanisms of data collection to target interventions into areas/cohorts with poor uptake during the season. Alongside this, additional trained workforce is being made available to local providers to help them vaccinate more eligible people. Public Health England will also be launching a new marketing campaign to encourage uptake of flu vaccination amongst eligible groups.

Additional flu vaccine has been purchased by the Department which will be available to providers to facilitate expansion of the programme.