Health protection in 5–16 year olds
Rochdale Borough has historically performed well in terms of childhood immunisation and vaccination, achieving nearly the 95% uptake target in some of the programmes. This means that the majority of local children have protection against infectious diseases. Like England as a whole, however, performance has been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and uptake has declined slightly across the board.
What is health protection?
Health protection refers to actions we might take to protect the population's health from major incidents and other threats (Office for Health Improvement & Disparities). This is achieved through a number of programmes including vaccinations, antibiotic prescription monitoring and other types of screening, as well as the monitoring of, and actions around, outbreaks of disease.
Childhood immunisations
The NHS offers everyone many different vaccinations to help protect us from infectious diseases. The NHS usually gives the injections during childhood, in particular during our first few months and years of life.
Common vaccinations given to older children include:
- 3-in-1 teenage booster for diphtheria, tetanus and polio
- HPV vaccine for girls only which protects against cervical cancer
- MenACWY vaccine which protects against meningitis types A, C, W and Y bacteria
Statistics on health protection
- Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) - Health protection profile - the Health Protection Profile covers a range of health protection issues, with information on various infections, but also interventions to reduce infection such as immunisation. The profile includes a section on immunisation and childhood vaccines for preventable diseases.
Guidance and information on health protection
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance - Immunisation - NICE has produced a number of guidance documents on immunisations including topics on reducing differences in uptake in under 19s, a pathway of recommendations for immunisations and shared learning examples of community engagement to increase childhood immunisations.
- NHS Choices - the NHS Choices website includes a checklist of vaccinations that are routinely offered for free on the NHS.