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ℹ️ Introduction
This article explains how Ardens resources can support your practice in planning, delivering, monitoring, and evaluating the Seasonal Influenza vaccination programme in line with NHS England guidance. By the end of this article, you will understand how to use the available Ardens resources throughout the vaccination season.
Background
The NHS England Guidance for the National Seasonal Influenza immunisation programme 2025-26 outlines the following vaccination schedule:
From 1st September 2025, the following groups are eligible:
Pregnant women
Children aged 2 or 3 on 31 August 2025
Primary school-aged children (Reception to Year 6) - School programme only
Secondary school-aged children (Years 7 to 11) - School programme only
Children aged 6 months to under 18 years in clinical risk groups
From October 2025, additional groups include:
Adults aged 65+
Adults aged 18 to 64 in clinical risk groups (as per the Green Book)
Residents in long-stay care homes
Carers (in receipt of allowance or main carer for elderly/disabled)
Close contacts of immunocompromised individuals
Frontline social care workers without employer-led occupational health
Recommended Vaccines (JCVI)
6m–1y: TIVc (2nd: TIVe)
2–17y: LAIV (2nd: TIVc / 3rd: TIVe)
18–49y: TIVr/TIVc (2nd: TIVe)
50–59y: TIVr/TIVc/aTIV (2nd: TIVe)
60–64y: TIVr/TIVc/aTIV/TIV-HD (2nd: TIVe)
65+ (on 31/03/26): TIVr/aTIV/TIV-HD (2nd: TIVc)
How Ardens Can Help
Ardens resources support practices throughout the flu vaccination programme by helping to:
Identify eligible cohorts
Organise recalls and invitations
Manage housebound and care home visits
Record vaccine administration
Monitor uptake and payment activity
Forecast future vaccine demand
⚠️ Please note:
Ardens searches use SNOMED codes, while the Green Book uses clinical definitions
Not all eligibility criteria translate directly into coded data
Business rules for payment may differ from clinical eligibility
Clinical judgement should guide decisions in ambiguous cases
📅 Plan
Review Before
Before sending out any invites, we recommend reviewing the following reports. These help ensure your invite lists are accurate and clinically appropriate. Some examples include:
PSD / PSD groups (if needed): Identifies patients who had flu vaccines in previous seasons and may require a new Patient Specific Direction (PSD) this year.
A prescriber should review each patient individually and record the PSD using:
SystmOne: “Electronic PSD authorisation” field in the Seasonal Influenza Vaccination template.
EMIS: PSD protocol.
⚠️Please note: These patients need to be reviewed individually and not in batches to ensure that it's clinically safe to administer the vaccine and protect staff administering it. For further information, see the CQC mythbusters.
Vaccine suitability: Check for clinical reasons a patient should not receive a particular vaccine, or may need an alternative:
Alternative vaccine - 6m–17y + aspirin in last 6m (contraindicates LAIV).
Recorded previously - Lives with immunocompromised person, health and social care worker (both before 01/04/2025).
Current contraindications - As recorded last season, egg allergy, specific contraindication this season.
Incorrect decline code - Seasonal Influenza vaccination declined but with a non-seasonal decline code.
End of life - Influenza vaccination not indicated.
Eligibility coding: Ensure patient records reflect current eligibility so they appear in invite and payment reports:
Needs influenza vaccination - Various conditions where the code should be added/re-added on/after 01/09/2025:
Household contacts of immunosuppressed - Add 'Lives with immunocompromised person' code using the vaccination template if applicable.
Invite children aged 6m–17y at risk or pregnant (excluding childhood ES) - Check for eligible children outside standard school programme.
Age-related eligibility - Patients aged 18–64y who are at risk or pregnant; those turning 18 during season.
Status verification: Confirm whether a patient’s recorded status is still correct, and update if not:
Pregnancy - Confirm still pregnant; update coding if delivery or pregnancy loss.
BMI ≥ 40 - Update if last recorded before 01/04/2023.
Care home resident/housebound/carer - Confirm or add 'no longer' codes if no longer applicable.
Persistent contraindication - Review outdated or incorrect allergy/contraindication codes. Mark in error to ensure re-invite where appropriate.
Long-term indication - Confirm patients coded with a long-term indication for influenza vaccination.
Cohorts and Due
Use these searches to estimate vaccine needs and plan stock orders. They are not designed for sending invitations:
Cohort reports: Show the total number of patients in each eligible group, regardless of vaccination or declined status.
Due reports: Focus specifically on patients who are still outstanding for vaccination.
⚠️ Please note: Patients may appear in more than one cohort. These reports do not remove patients once invite codes are added, so using them for invites may result in duplicate communications.
Ordering
To support planning ahead of the vaccination season, use the following Ardens folders to review patient counts by age group and eligibility. You can also use these searches throughout the season to understand your eligible populations. The ‘Due’ searches give a helpful estimate of patients still needing vaccination, which can be useful for placing top-up orders later in the season.
✉️Recall
These resources help GP practices efficiently manage the Seasonal Influenza vaccination programme by identifying eligible patients, organising invitations and follow-ups and planning vaccine orders - including special arrangements for care home and housebound patients.
Invites
Invite reports are grouped into the following folders:
Invite - September Onwards - Early groups (children, pregnant women, under-18 in risk groups).
Invite - October Onwards - Later groups (65+, at-risk adults, carers, close contacts of immunocompromised individuals).
Consider 2nd Vaccine - 6m–8y at-risk with no previous flu vaccine should be offered a second dose 4 weeks after their first.
⚠️ Please note:
Patients who turn 18 during September (and are not pregnant) are excluded from the September invite reports but will be included in the October invite reports (payment rules). If you wish to manage them differently, use the report ‘Currently 17 and turning 18 in September (not pregnant) – September payment applies only to under-18s and pregnancy (Included in invites from October onwards by default)’.
Care home residents and housebound patients are excluded from the main invite suite, patients included in the 04. Visits folder.
SystmOne Only: Patients with a preferred contact method of ‘No Communication’ appear in a separate folder and should be reviewed manually.
⚠️Please note: You can export invite lists to CSV and send messages using Accurx, SystmOne Communication Annexe or another third-party platform. Please see EMIS Web and SystmOne support articles for further information on how to do this.
Invitation coding: After inviting a patient, ensure the appropriate invitation SNOMED code is added to their record. This ensures they move to the correct 2nd or 3rd invite list. Always verify codes before use.
View codes
⚠️ Please note: Always check the code each time when adding to the patient record. Ardens are not responsible or liable for the codes above and any incorrect code being batch added to the patient records.
Influenza vaccination first telephone invitation | 1095821000000105 |
Influenza vaccination first verbal invitation | 860151000000103 |
Influenza vaccination invitation email | 844941000000103 |
Influenza vaccination invitation first email | 844961000000102 |
Influenza vaccination invitation first letter sent | 200481000000107 |
Influenza vaccination invitation first short message service text message sent | 1484831000000102 |
Influenza vaccination invitation letter sent | 315641001 |
Influenza vaccination invitation second email | 844981000000106 |
Influenza vaccination invitation second letter sent | 200491000000109 |
Influenza vaccination invitation second short message service text message sent | 1484841000000106 |
Influenza vaccination invitation short message service text message sent | 1484821000000104 |
Influenza vaccination invitation third email | 845001000000101 |
Influenza vaccination invitation third letter sent | 200501000000103 |
Influenza vaccination invitation third short message service text message sent | 1484851000000109 |
Influenza vaccination second telephone invitation | 1095831000000107 |
Influenza vaccination second verbal invitation | 860171000000107 |
Influenza vaccination third telephone invitation | 1095841000000103 |
Influenza vaccination third verbal invitation | 860291000000101 |
Influenza vaccination verbal invitation | 761311000000109 |
Invitation by telephone for influenza vaccination | 737041000 |
Visits
Separate visit reports are provided for housebound and care home residents so practices can use the list of patients to support administration of the seasonal influenza vaccination outside of the practice:
Care home residents (housebound / not housebound)
Housebound but not in a care home
These patients are excluded from all invitation reports, so use the Visits reports to plan and organise their vaccinations.
ℹ️ Remember to review relevant reports in folder "02. Review before" first to ensure the patient lists are accurate.
💉 Deliver
Administer
To support vaccine delivery and ensure accurate coding, protocols, and templates are available for consistent and efficient documentation.
Clinicians can use a protocol to easily record vaccinations. Before using the protocol, you must first ensure it is fully edited with the relevant vaccination details (e.g. batch numbers, expiry dates). For step by step guidance, please refer to this support article.
Once edited, each clinician will need to add the protocol to their F12 key:
Open a patient record and press F12.
Right-click on an available letter or number, then select Add.
Search for and select the saved "Flu Vaccine Administration" protocol.
The protocol is now ready for use:
Press F12 and select the "Flu Vaccine Administration" protocol.
This will launch a consultation window. Update the Consultation Properties screen if required.
A multiple-choice prompt will appear—follow the on-screen prompts to enter the appropriate vaccine information into the patient record.
⚠️ Please note: The protocol automatically checks the patient's age and prompts with the appropriate vaccine type based on current guidelines.
📈 Evaluate
These resources help practices manage and monitor the Seasonal Influenza vaccination programme by identifying data issues, tracking vaccination uptake, forecasting future eligibility, and providing dashboards to analyse and target patient groups more effectively.
Review after
To help ensure accurate payment and data integrity, several data quality reports are available. These reports highlight potential data entry issues that could affect payment eligibility. Common data quality scenarios include:
Needs influenza vaccination - vaccinated but not in business rules eligibility - Add 'Needs influenza immunisation' dated on or after 1st September 2025 if eligible.
Duplicate or incorrect vaccine codes - Remove duplicates, correct errors, or add correct code using the Ardens Seasonal Influenza template (or protocol if EMIS).
Inactive SMS invite codes - Replace with active invite code.
Dose sequence errors - Add missing first dose or correct “given elsewhere” entries.
Out-of-season vaccinations - Review August entries and September entries for 18+ non-pregnant patients.
Payment
PPA Claims (FP34D) - Assist with vaccine cost claims without needing prescriptions, as considered a 'high volume vaccine'.
CQRS - Track patients who meet the requirements for payment claims.
Audit
Audit - Monitor vaccine uptake by cohort, low uptake and vaccines given by GP practice or other healthcare professionals.
Co-administered with COVID (EMIS only) - Identifies patients who have received both the flu and COVID vaccines.
Immform (EMIS only) - Supports national reporting submissions.
Insights
For Ardens Manager subscribers, the Vaccinations dashboard provides a clear visual overview of:
Eligible cohorts
Number of invitations sent
Vaccination uptake rates
You can also filter and analyse data by:
Clinical risk groups
Low uptake groups
This helps you prioritise and target specific patient populations more effectively.
⏩ Next Year
Estimates
These reports help practices plan ahead by identifying patients likely to become eligible for the 2026–27 Seasonal Influenza season based on 2025-26 eligibility criteria. For example, they include patients who are currently 64 and not at risk, but will turn 65 by 1st September 2027.
Review after
Payment & Audit
Next Year Estimates
❓FAQs
Why are care home patients excluded from invite reports?
Care home and housebound patients are managed separately within the Visits workflow.
Can invitation reports be used directly for messaging?
Yes. Reports can be exported to CSV format and used with approved messaging platforms.
Why are some patients excluded from September invites?
Patients turning 18 during September are included from October onwards in line with payment rules unless pregnant.
🏫Additional Support
To further your understanding of the Ardens resources:
Book training for your GP Practice, PCN or ICB
Contact our Support Team for support in real time