Primary care bulletin - 11 June 2025

Inviting parents and guardians to get their child vaccinated

GP practices can use a UK Health Security Agency template to invite parents and guardians to get their child vaccinated at the local surgery.

Please note the British Islamic Medical Association have also updated their guidance on flu vaccination.

Changes to childhood vaccinations

A summary document has been produced outlining the resources published on the gov.uk website.

Cervical sample takers' competency responsibilities

As stipulated in national guidance, all cervical sample takers who carry out this procedure and practise in London must have a London cervical sample taker PIN. This is unique to the individual sample taker and must not be shared with others.

Read the guidance in full.

SMS messaging update

We are sharing the first SMS patient messaging data for 25/26. As you are aware, from April 2025 the SMS fragment allocation reduced to 30p per patient for this financial year. This information has previously been shared in GP practice bulletins, via email and at primary care webinars. The reduction in SMS allocation was signed off by the ICB as part of a three-year SMS business case. This has also been shared with the Local Medical Committee.

The SMS data dashboard has been published, which shows GP practice usage for both Accurx and all message sent via your clinical systems. This includes online consultation suppliers. However, it does not include any providers that are self-funded and also Blinx in Hillingdon, as the provider is not on the same SMS gateway.

Please note that there is also information about the number of messages that have been sent via the NHS App. This year we are not expecting to receive any national funding to support GP practices with SMS usage. Therefore, it is likely that GP practices will be charged for SMS messages once utilisation has exceeded 30p per patient. This charge will be issued on a quarterly basis via your PCSE statement. To support GP practices with financial planning, this SMS dashboard forecasts when GP practices are likely to go over the SMS allocation, and if they are over the 30p by how much they are over that allocation.

Find out more, including details of related training.

Recording clozapine and other hospital-Issued medicines on GP systems as hospital only medications

It's important to ensure that hospital-issued or specialist-prescribed medications, particularly red-listed medicines such as clozapine, are recorded on GP clinical systems (EMIS/SystmOne) as “hospital-only” medications, not as repeats.

Find out more about why this is important and how you can correctly record in EMIS and SYSTMOne. Further guidance is also available.

Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS) extractions for maternal pertussis and maternal RSV vaccination programmes

We initially contacted practices at the end of November 2024 to advise of a possible national issue with the acute trust vaccination PoC System: Record a Vaccination (RAVS), affecting maternal Pertussis, maternal RSV and possibly maternal flu vaccination programmes and the automatic extraction of data for the purposes of CQRS/practice payments. It was later confirmed that the flu programme was not affected.

We have not approved any September or October 2024 Pertussis claims unless the practice has confirmed that the patient’s records has been checked to confirm that the vaccination was indeed given by the practice and not by another provider (as a practice does not claim for activity undertaken by another provider).

As the RSV Pregnant Women programme was a manual entry, none of the data could be re-run and all claims for September to December 2024 will need to be checked and confirmed before any approvals will be done.

Find out what actions you need to take.

Upgrade of GP laptops - reminder

Windows 10 will reach end of life on 14 October 2025. Subsequently support, including security updates, will no longer be available after this date. This presents a security risk to your data and systems. Therefore, the upgrade of your devices to Windows 11 is mandatory.

NHS North West London ICT have begun upgrading laptops. We will remotely make a configuration change to your laptop that allows/forces it to download the Windows 11 upgrade from Microsoft directly to your device. The configuration change depends on you accessing the corporate network and logging in.

Find out more about the upgrade and how Windows 11 looks and feels.

Promoting the NHS App – help patients access care more easily

We’ve launched a local campaign encouraging patients to download and use the NHS App. It helps people book GP appointments, order repeat prescriptions and access their records, all from their phone.

We’re targeting young people and working adults and would love your support.
If you have waiting room screens, feel free to use the campaign materials. If you still have printed materials from previous NHS App campaigns (e.g. posters or flyers), please display these in reception or other high footfall areas where possible.

GPs might also find our upcoming NHS app training useful.

Education and training