Flu vaccination by pharmacists leads to suboptimal medical records
BMJ 2017; 359 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j5084 (Published 09 November 2017) Cite this as: BMJ 2017;359:j5084
- Simon de Lusignan, professor of primary care and clinical informatics and medical director, RCGP Research and Surveillance Centre1,
- Matthew Hoghton, medical director2,
- Imran Rafi, chair2
- 1University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7HX, UK
- 2Clinical Innovation and Research Centre, Royal College of General Practitioners, London NW1 2FB, UK
- s.lusignan{at}surrey.ac.uk
We don’t condone unfair pressure on patients to have their flu vaccine at their general practitioner’s surgery,1 but pharmacist vaccination leads to problems with data integrity.
The communication from pharmacist to general practitioner is suboptimal. It is often on paper and states only that the vaccination has occurred, without the vaccine manufacturer or batch number. In contrast to many other communications, it does not include a recommendation for coding key data into computerised medical record systems, which can lead to inconsistency.
Information sent on paper might get scanned into the patients records but not coded, making it invisible when conducting searches to identify unvaccinated people. Missing data can affect our ability to monitor vaccine effectiveness.2
The lack of data on manufacturer or batch number makes monitoring of adverse events—recommended by the European Medicines Agency—more challenging3 and reduces the chance of linking any severe adverse event to brand or batch.
Some pharmacies use a bespoke software that provides a PDF file for general practice. It would be much better if it transferred coded information, perhaps in the same way as blood test results are transferred to the computerised medical record systems in general practice.
In a health system where patients increasingly enjoy the benefits of electronic prescribing and data are increasingly shared electronically, we must find a better way of passing more complete information about pharmacist vaccination to the patient’s records in general practice.
Footnotes
Competing interests: SdL as part of his university role, is the medical director of the Royal College of General Practitioners Research and Surveillance Centre. Its public health role includes surveillance for influenza and supporting estimates of vaccine effectiveness. He is also a member of several European vaccine research consortia and has a grant from GSK to pilot a system to monitor European Medicines Agency vaccine side effects. These activities (all through the University of Surrey) are frustrated by an inability to get complete brand specific vaccination data. MH and IR have no competing interests.
Full response at: http://www.bmj.com/content/359/bmj.j4682/rr-2.