This page contains links to national public-facing surveillance reports. Further reports for NHS staff are available on the VPDP SharePoint site.
This section provides information on how the Public Health Wales Vaccine Preventable Disease Programme (PHW VPDP) collects and processes personal data and should be read in conjunction with the PHW Privacy Notice which can be found here: Privacy Notice - Public Health Wales
Demographic, clinical and vaccination information is collected by PHW VPDP from a variety of sources to enable robust evaluation and reporting on vaccination programmes across Wales.
Information on vaccinations in children are mainly sourced from the Childhood and Young Persons Integrated System (CYPrIS), whilst vaccination data for adults is primarily sourced from GP practice systems and the all-Wales Immunisation System (WIS). In more specific instances vaccination data may be collected and returned to PHW VPDP from other sources, such as local health board systems, maternity data systems or pharmacies.
Accurate and timely collection of data is essential for production of vaccination coverage statistics that are used to monitor trends, assess equity of uptake and identify areas that may be at risk of outbreaks from vaccine preventable disease.
Vaccination data may be supplemented with demographic information to enable monitoring of equity in vaccination uptake and to identify areas where resources or interventions may need to be prioritised.
Diagnostic information and surveillance data from laboratories across Wales and National Reference Laboratories in England, as well as clinical notifications from the PHW Health Protection Team may be used alongside vaccination data to evaluate vaccine effectiveness and impact. In some cases, this requires linkage of clinical information to vaccination history.
Information on hospital admissions, calls to NHS 111, A&E attendances or GP consultations may also be used to help assess risks from vaccine preventable infections, vaccine impact and vaccine effectiveness.
Outputs from on-going evaluation of vaccination programmes are used to provide feedback to policy makers, those who deliver and manage vaccination services, and the scientific and public health community, to support development of evidence-based public health guidance. Individual level data are not shared outside of PHW VPDP unless required for national or cross-border health protection purposes.
Where possible, only anonymised data are collected and stored. However, where this is not possible, only the minimum level of identifiable information will be collected that is needed to successfully carry out our work to control the spread of vaccine preventable disease. All data are stored securely adhering to NHS Wales information governance guidance. Data are retrained for no longer than is required for the performance of the task, however in some instances it may be necessary to anonymise and retain data indefinitely for future epidemiological investigation.
Vaccination plays in important part in the control of communicable diseases. PHW is required to collect and process information about ‘notifiable diseases’ and ‘causative agents’ and is authorised by law to process information in connection with controlling and preventing the spread of communicable disease.