From 1 September 2024:
- Pregnant women
- Children aged 2 or 3 years on 31 August 2024
- Primary school aged children (from Reception to Year 6)
- Secondary school aged children (from Year 7 to Year 11)
- Children in clinical risk groups aged from 6 months to less than 18 years
From October 2024, exact start date to be confirmed by NHS England in due course:
- Patients 65 years and over
- Patients 18 to 64 clinically at risk (Green Book, Influenza Chapter 19)
- Patients in long-stay residential care homes
- Carers
- Close contacts of immunocompromised individuals
- Frontline workers in a social care setting without employer led OH scheme
Frontline health care workers, both clinical/non-clinical staff, who have contact with patients, offered flu vaccine from October (exact start date tbc) as a vital part of the organisations’ policy for the prevention of the transmission of flu. Social care workers directly working with people clinically vulnerable to flu should also have the flu vaccine provided by their employer.
Based on the evidence flu vaccine effectiveness can wane over time in adults JCVI advised moving the start of the programme for most adults to the beginning of October. This is on the understanding the majority of the will be completed by end of November, closer to the time flu season commonly starts.
Protection from the vaccine lasts longer in children, therefore the priority is to start vaccinating all children (including those in clinical risk groups) from 1 September.
Further guidance will follow on how the flu programme should be aligned to any autumn COVID-19 vaccination programme. Providers are encouraged to align delivery of the flu vaccination programme with other commissioned vaccination programmes for which the patient may be eligible (for instance shingles, pertussis, or pneumococcal vaccines) where it is clinically acceptable, operationally feasible, and where the patient is content.