After the changes to flu funding last year, with achievement payments moving from QOF to the IIF, you might be forgiven for thinking that this year it should be straightforward and follow the same pattern. You’d be wrong!

If you’re part of a PCN, or indeed, even if you’re not, the Influenza Enhanced Service this year offers the opportunity to vaccinate as part of a collaborative grouping. For many practices who vaccinated their patients for Covid-19 using just such a collaboration, it perhaps seems a logical next step, as the achievement payments are now routed through the PCN.

Importantly the Enhanced Service draws our attention to the opportunity to vaccinate by co-administering with Covid-19 vaccinations, or indeed more mysteriously, ‘synergistically’ with Covid-19 vaccinations.

In case you’re wondering, the dictionary definition for synergistically is ‘interactively or co-operatively so that each element or party increases the effect of the other’.

You might be forgiven for wondering what synergistically means in the context of flu vaccinations.  If co-administered means ‘the administration of two or more drugs together’, then synergistically certainly doesn’t mean that. Presumably, what NHSE meant to say is that whilst you’re working in a collaborative grouping and working on both the flu and Covid-19 boosters together, you might not necessarily be administering them at the same time.

So, why is this terminology so important? Taken from the Enhanced Service (v1.0, 22 August 2022) the sections you might be interested in are as follows:

• 10.10 – Where the influenza vaccination is provided as either co-administration or synergistically with the COVID-19 vaccine and the Practice has elected to use the Point of Care system, the payment (as set out at paragraph 10.1) will be made to the nominated host practice in accordance with paragraph 10.11.

• 10.11 – Where the Practice elects to administer influenza vaccinations as part of a PCN grouping:
• • 10.11.1 – through co-administration with COVID-19 vaccinations, then the Practice must nominate their COVID-19 PCN grouping host practice to receive payments for the co-administered vaccinations, which will be calculated using the Point of Care System; and/or
  • 10.11.2 – synergistically with COVID-19 vaccinations, then the Practice may elect whether to use either CQRS or the Point of Care System for the recording and calculation of vaccinations but not both. Where the Point of Care System is used, the Practice shall nominate their PCN grouping host practice to receive payments for the synergistically administered vaccinations.

For practices with well-established Covid-19 collaborations, it might make sense to try and deliver both programmes together. But if that’s the case you’ll need to consider carefully how you deal with the administrative aspects of both campaigns, and you might find that the shock of last years’ QOF changes, is replicated in missing Enhanced Service income.

We have looked at this and other important aspects of the flu and children’s flu campaigns and have created ready-made social media and text messaging content along with template letters, posters and a host of other useful resources.

Helpful links

National flu campaign 2022 [PLUS]

Children’s flu campaign 2022 [PLUS]

Flu clinic 2022 – Template for patient communications [PLUS]