Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government how they plan to assess the impact of new immunisation programmes for infant respiratory syncytial virus on (1) hospitalisations, and (2) health inequality.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) monitors national immunisation programmes in England. The UKHSA’s Severe Acute Respiratory Infection Watch surveillance system collects weekly information on admissions to hospital with Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), to monitor admission rates in each RSV season. If a programme is introduced, monitoring of its effectiveness would include thorough analysis of immunisation records, both infant or maternal, and laboratory results for patients needing healthcare for RSV-like illness. The UKHSA can also monitor RSV admissions by deprivation and ethnicity, using routine National Health Service records, when these become available following the RSV season. The UKHSA will also monitor inequalities in uptake of the RSV immunisation programmes, through its routine uptake data collections.