Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans NHS England has to establish performance floors setting out minimum levels of vaccination coverage in different areas of the country, in line with the commitment in its Putting Patients First business plan.

NHS England has a specific role to commission those public health services set out in the Section 7A public health functions agreement 2016-17, including immunisation programmes and to hold to account providers to ensure that they deliver the contracts that have been agreed. The agreement sets out specific outputs and outcomes to be achieved by NHS England including performance indicators that outline minimum levels of vaccination coverage for different programmes. NHS England publishes national service specifications outlining the minimum levels of vaccinations expected, which in turn are put into contracts with providers at local level.

The Section 7A agreement requires NHS England to at least maintain, or improve, national levels of performance on existing services, while also implementing planned changes. It also includes an ambition to reduce local variation in performance between different geographical areas.

There are no plans to review incentives, however a number are already in place. For example, within primary care general practitioner (GP) settings, some vaccination services such as flu for those with diabetes have quality outcome framework indicators attached, whereby GPs are rewarded for good practice. Also, as part of the contracts given outside of the primary care settings, local teams can develop Commissioning for Quality and Innovation payments that link a proportion of providers' income to the achievement of local quality improvement goals.