TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Background
The NHS England Guidance for the national Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) programme provides vaccination protection for both infants and older adults.
Vaccination Schedule
The vaccination schedule commenced on the 1st September 2024 and includes the following cohorts:
- Adults aged 75 years old - eligible until their 80th birthday
- Adults aged 75 - 79 years old on 31st August 2024 - eligible until their 80th birthday or eligible until 31st August 2026 depending on date of birth
- Pregnant women from 28 weeks gestation - eligible until birth
From 1 April 2026, the eligibility criteria will be expanded to include:
- All adults aged 80 years and over
- All residents in care homes for older adults
How Ardens can help
Ardens resources support practices in planning, recalling, delivering, and evaluating the RSV vaccination uptake, including templates, reports and a dashboard.
⚠️ Please note:
- Ardens searches use SNOMED codes, while the Green Book uses clinical definitions
- Not all eligibility criteria translate directly into coded data
- Business rules for payment may differ from clinical eligibility
- Clinical judgement should guide decisions in ambiguous cases
Plan
Before sending out any invites, we recommend reviewing the Plan folder. These reports will help you to identify your eligible patients and ensure your invite lists are accurate and clinically appropriate.
Cohorts
Use these searches to estimate vaccine needs and plan stock orders. They are not designed for sending invitations. These searches show the total number of patients in each eligible group, regardless of vaccination or declined status.
Due
These reports focus specifically on patients who are still outstanding for vaccination and have not declined vaccination. There is a search identifying all patients due, with additional searches broken down by each cohort.
Review Before
Notify
Invites
Invite reports include all eligible patients (excluding those patients living in a care home or are housebound). These are broken down by the pregnancy cohort and routine cohorts. Each folder is then broken down by 1st, 2nd and 3rd invites.
Using the reports you can then see information on patients with reasonable adjustments, LD, SMI, Dementia, End of Life, along with contact method and communication preferences.
You can export invite lists to CSV and send messages using Accurx or other third-party platform. Please see this support article for further information on how to do this.
When running the Invite searches, use a relative run date that matches the planned date of your RSV clinic. This helps ensure that patients invited have not yet reached 80 years of age on that specific date. If you are unsure how to use a relative run date, please refer to this support article.
⚠️ Please note: Only the following two RSV-specific invitation codes should be used when sending out invitations:
- RSV vaccination invitation letter - 2242701000000103
- RSV vaccination invitation SMS text message - 2242691000000103
⚠️ Please note: A patient will be excluded from the invite process only if they have been coded with any of the following:
- Administration of RSV vaccination
- RSV vaccination contraindicated
- RSV vaccination declined
Patients should not be vaccinated before they enter the specified programme age range, or become the specified number of weeks pregnant. Therefore, a patient who reaches their 75th birthday on the 1st December can only be vaccinated from that date, and a patient who is 20 weeks pregnant at the start of the programme should not be vaccinated until she reaches at least 28 weeks of pregnancy.
Visits
Separate visit reports are provided for housebound and care home residents to support planning outside of general invite workflows.
Deliver
To support vaccine delivery and ensure accurate coding, a protocol and template is available for consistent and efficient documentation.
RSV Vaccine Eligibility alert
To alert practice staff to eligibility, Ardens has produced the 'RSV Vaccine Eligibility Alert'. This is a medium-priority pink box alert that will show if the patient's age determines their eligibility for the RSV vaccination, or if the patient may be pregnant and therefore may be eligible for the RSV vaccine.
Double click on the pink box alert to access a template that allows you to record administration of the vaccine.
Adult Immunisation Template
The Ardens 'Adult Immunisations' template enables the recording of RSV vaccination, consent, contraindication, declines and aftercare information given.
RSV Vaccination Administration protocol
The 'RSV Vaccination Administration' protocol is manually accessed via the F12 key. Before clinicians can begin using the protocol, you must first ensure it is fully edited with the relevant vaccination details (e.g. batch numbers, expiry dates etc). To edit this protocol, you must first create a copy of the protocol and save it to a local practice folder. You will now be able to edit the copied version of the protocol. For further information on this process please see this support article.
Once edited, each clinician will need to add the protocol to their F12 key:
- Open a patient record and press F12.
- Right-click on an available letter or number, then select Add.
- Search for and select the saved "RSV vaccination administration" protocol.
The protocol is now ready for use:
- Press F12 and select the "RSV vaccine administration" protocol.
- This will launch a consultation window. Update the Consultation Properties screen if required.
- A multiple-choice prompt will appear—follow the on-screen prompts to enter the appropriate vaccine information into the patient record.
⚠️ Please note: In order for the RSV vaccination to be correctly included in the CQRS extract, administration of the vaccine must be recorded as GMS.
Evaluate
These resources help practices manage and monitor the RSV vaccination programme by tracking uptake and providing dashboards to analyse and target patient groups more effectively.
Review
The 'Review after' folder highlights potential data issues. The search 'For review after I ?Consider adding pregnancy code on same day as vaccine' suggests the patient was vaccinated due to being pregnant, however for payment, a pregnancy codes needs to be recorded on the same date as the vaccination.
Administration
This folder enables monitoring update, broken down by those recorded as GMS and GMS false. It also identifies those recorded as contraindicated or declined.
Payment Reports
Navigate to Population Reporting > Ardens Searches > 5.40 Contracts - CQRS 2025-26.
These reports support monitoring of monthly extractions and highlight potential data quality issues that may impact payment.
Additional Learning
To help further your understanding of the vaccination programmes and how to make the most of the Ardens resources:
- Explore more helpful resources in our Vaccination Support Articles.
If you require any further assistance on the process above, please contact Ardens support on: