Locala Health and Wellbeing has formed a partnership with Inhealthcare to support its vaccination programmes across Kirklees in West Yorkshire, through which the consent process for childhood immunisation has been digitised.
Where immunisation teams would previously print consent forms, deliver them to schools across the area, collect completed forms and chase up late or non-responds, the new digital service enables nurses to prepare for their work by refreshing their digital device to see how many children are on the immunisation list.
The Inhealthcare service is said to enable consent to be gathered “at speed” and supports environmental goals through reducing use of paper.
The service works by sending an online questionnaire to parents to gather consent and medical information. Contraindications are flagged as notifications to clinicians for review and the service creates a list of eligible children. It integrates the results of the programme into the patient records and also provides a dashboard with real-time data to report take-up across the population demographic.
In addition, parents receive details of vaccine dose and batch number once the child has been immunised, with feedback from parents indicating that this is “a much valued communication”.
Linda Webster, Team Leader for Child Health at Locala, said: “The system overall is brilliant, especially the communication with parents. The nurses love it as well. It gives you everything you need to run the immunisation service from start to finish without having to worry about getting forms out to school and back again.”
Bryn Sage, Chief Executive of Inhealthcare, said: “Digitising paper-based processes is all about helping to create vital capacity within the NHS by getting rid of time-consuming paperwork and freeing up valuable resources to focus on public health. It is also contributing to the nation’s net zero target by helping the NHS to go paperless.”
