Updated 16 May 2023
IntraHealth East Lancs Office provides a bespoke NHS England commissioned School Aged Immunisation Service (SAIS) to the children and young people living within the East Lancashire and Blackburn with Darwen localities. The registered office for the service is located at Unit 21, Bancroft Road, Burnley BB10 2TP.
The service visits schools and community venues to vaccinate children and young people but also run clinics in other locations such as their own office clinic, community centres and in the child or young person’s home on occasion. The vaccines are stored at the office location.
IntraHealth Ltd is the CQC registered provider for the service and they provide a range of primary health care services across the north of England
The service is registered to provide the following regulated activities:
- Treatment of disease, disorder or injury.
The East Lancs vaccination team operate vaccination clinics in primary and secondary schools, and at other locations to deliver vaccinations against common infectious diseases such as meningitis, polio, diphtheria, flu and HPV. A timetable for the administration of the different vaccinations is followed with Diphtheria, Tetanus and Polio (DTP) and meningococcal bacteria -, (MenACWY) vaccinations take place in the first quarter of the year followed by HPV in the months of April to July. Measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) catch up takes place in June and July, followed by general catch ups for all missed vaccinations during July and August. This is followed by the flu vaccinations which takes place from September to December. The school vaccination teams visit each school in accordance with a schedule agreed with each school.
The service provides a vaccination programme to 233 primary schools offering vaccinations to 50,400 young children each year and to 24068 secondary school children attending the 68 secondary schools in the localities. If a child or young person misses their vaccination, additional clinics are set up in community venues and in schools to offer an additional opportunity to receive a vaccination.
During March 2023 the service undertook 2153 vaccinations for DTP, MenACWY and HPV. The biggest cohort of vaccinations is for flu vaccinations, the service delivered 5,000 per week during the period from September 2022 to December 2022.
Access to the service is facilitated through the child and young person’s school. Contact is made with parents and caregivers to obtain consent and then the child attended the pre-planned session in their school. Catch up sessions were arranged periodically if vaccinations had been missed.
Information about the SAIS service can be found on the provider’s website: https://www.intrahealth.co.uk/clinical-services/patients/immunisation-vaccination/
How we inspected this service
Before the inspection we spoke with a number of staff including the clinical director for IntraHealth Ltd, the registered manager and members of the nursing and administration team. We reviewed a wide range of documents and risk assessments received before our inspection, observed staff undertaking a young people’s vaccination clinic within a secondary school and we spoke with staff at the office for the service.
As part of this inspection we visited and observed a clinic in a local school to observe the vaccination clinic taking place there.
To get to the heart of patients’ experiences of care and treatment, we always ask the following five questions:
- Is it safe?
- Is it effective?
- Is it caring?
- Is it responsive to people’s needs?
- Is it well-led?
These questions therefore formed the framework for the areas we looked at during the inspection.