Pharmacy: Vaccination

(asked on 18th September 2025) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, with regard to the focus on care in the community in the NHS 10 Year Health Plan for England, what steps they are considering to enable pharmacies to administer all adult NHS vaccinations, including for shingles and pneumococcal, to support equitable uptake from all communities.


Answered by
Baroness Merron Portrait
Baroness Merron
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 1st October 2025

The Department does not currently have plans to enable community pharmacies to administer all National Health Service adult vaccinations. To take forward our commitment to give community pharmacy a bigger role in prevention by expanding their role in vaccine delivery, as set out in the 10-Year Health Plan, we are piloting the use of community pharmacy across several routine vaccination programmes, including respiratory syncytial virus for older adults.

In addition, the national booking service opened on 1 September 2025, allowing all eligible adults the opportunity to book their seasonal flu and/or COVID-19 vaccination appointments from 1 October 2025.

We will continue to work with NHS England to explore and evaluate opportunities to expand the role of community pharmacy in vaccination delivery where this may support our efforts to improve uptake.

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