Transforming childhood immunisation information: the real-world impact of the CHIS Healthcare Professional Portal
Following GP practice concerns about children under the age of four persistently missing immunisations, the NHS South, Central and West CHIS team developed a dedicated Healthcare Professional Portal.
Challenge
Post COVID, increasing immunisation uptake in children under 4 is not just a clinical priority, it is essential to:
- prevent avoidable suffering and death
- safeguard public health progress
- re-establish a foundation of community protection.
In Reading, childhood immunisation is notably low, especially in some practices. One local surgery identified a strong correlation between low immunisation rates and poor engagement with the Health Visiting Service.
What we did
In 2024, the NHS South, Central and West (NHS SCW) Child Health Information Service (CHIS) and the Digital, Data and Technology team embarked on a journey to develop a web-based portal for use by healthcare professionals involved in the delivery of UKHSA Childhood Screening and Immunisation Programmes. This ranged from GP practices to health visitors to school age immunisation teams.
The Healthcare Professional Portal was developed to meet both the DCB0129 and DCB0160 clinical risk management standards and a controlled pilot was undertaken with a number of external stakeholders within the Surrey and Thames Valley regions. As part of the pilot, the Portal was used by colleagues at Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust.
The NHS SCW CHIS Healthcare Professional Portal allowed colleagues to view key data sources in one place – unlocking new insights and enabling more timely, targeted interventions.
With the Portal, they could:
- Quickly cross-reference immunisation status with health visiting records for each child
- Identify gaps in care
- Support conversations between GP surgeries, health visiting teams and immunisation services using a shared, reliable view of data.
The Portal has been designed with healthcare professionals in mind, to provide accessible, timely information to enable easy identification of particular cohorts of children based on criteria such as Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) or ethnicity. In addition, the Portal provides a child-level view of demographic, screening and immunisation data to enable a more detailed analysis of information to support multidisciplinary discussions and agreement of next steps.
Activity
Child Health Information Services
Working collaboratively with healthcare professional across multiple disciplines to develop the Portal to support systemwide sharing of childhood screening and vaccination information.
Reducing health inequalities
Creating a series of tools to empower health professionals to quickly identify children who do not have complete UKHSA Screening and Immunisation Programmes.
Impact
There were a number of benefits realised through the development of the NHS SCW CHIS Healthcare Professional Portal:
- Joined-up care: brought visibility to records of children at risk who may have been missed due to siloed systems
- Improved targeting: enabled focused follow-up for families with little or no engagement with healthcare professionals and incomplete immunisation statuses
- Time savings: eliminated the need to manually extract and compare data across platforms
- Data-led decision making: helped prioritise where to act first, with functionality to transform data to support service planning.
Access to timely, accurate information enabled the scope of the project with the GP practice to be increased. Records of all children up to the age of four who have not been screened or have incomplete vaccination schedules can be reviewed and next steps identified.
The NHS SCW CHIS Healthcare Professional Portal is more than a data system – it is becoming a core enabler of collaborative information sharing across healthcare economies.