Preparing to roll out school-based immunisations: Best practice tips

Hertfordshire Community Trust (HCT) deliver the school-aged immunisation programme across Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge and Peterborough and is known as the Community and School Aged Immunisation Service (CSAIS).

Delivering over ½ million vaccines a year during our school-aged programme alone, the teams are knowledgeable about how to run effective sessions and the particularities of each school.

The principles are:

‘… it is also important to have clinic sessions arranged for evenings and weekends. This is to support young people who were not happy to be vaccinated at school or who have missed the school vaccination session due to absence.’

In addition to the school session, it is also important to have clinic sessions arranged for evenings and weekends. This is to support young people who were not happy to be vaccinated at school or who have missed the school vaccination session due to absence. These clinics should be direct booking or walk ins, depending on your knowledge of the local area; often a mixture of the two approaches is appropriate. The clinics are arranged at local community centres and places of worship, which generally sit at the heart of communities and encourage support from community and faith leaders. Accurate data helps us to pinpoint areas of low vaccine uptake and we organise our clinics within these areas. HCT also offers home visits, where appropriate, and we even team up with our Special Care Dental service to vaccinate young people under sedation, who would not tolerate vaccination in usual circumstances.