Opportunistic vaccination in a children’s hospital outpatients department

Abstract

Correspondence to Dr Jonathan Cohen; [email protected] Vaccination coverage for all routine childhood immunisations is lower in London than in other English regions and below WHO targets.1 This is driven by factors that include sustained pressures in primary care and structural barriers to accessing vaccination, compounded by deprivation, other social inequities and population mobility,2 exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.3 Opportunistic vaccination in secondary care settings, combined with existing efforts in primary care, may be an approach to increase coverage and reduce inequalities for underserved communities. Key challenges included the resource-intensive nature of the delivery model, integrating vaccination into routine patient care, ensuring outpatient staff access to patient immunisation records and triangulating conflicting patient immunisation records. [...]research should explore the feasibility of delivery models in which immunisation is integrated into routine patient care, particularly if supporting uptake across the childhood immunisation schedule.