Current status: Answered by Jenni Minto on 17 September 2024
To ask the Scottish Government what the cost was of the previous winter vaccination programme, broken down by NHS board.
The Scottish Government welcomes the innovation, continuous improvement and efficiency that Health Board delivery teams have demonstrated to make best use of resources and funding throughout our national vaccination programmes, which remain a key public health intervention.
The Scottish Government provided £80 million on an National Resource Allocation formula (NRAC) basis to cover local Board vaccine delivery costs for the full financial year 2023/24.
These funds were allocated to the following programmes, the largest of which was the winter Seasonal Flu & COVID-19 booster programme:
Boards also used this funding to deliver across the full range of other vaccine programmes. A breakdown of investment provided to each Health Board is as follows.
Allocations by Territorial Board 2023-24 | ||
Unified Budget target shares | NRAC Share | |
NHS Ayrshire and Arran | 7.32% | £5,854,246 |
NHS Borders | 2.15% | £1,716,573 |
NHS Dumfries and Galloway | 2.97% | £2,373,498 |
NHS Fife | 6.86% | £5,488,643 |
NHS Forth Valley | 5.46% | £4,370,004 |
NHS Grampian | 9.81% | £7,845,888 |
NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde | 22.18% | £17,743,815 |
NHS Highland | 6.58% | £5,265,083 |
NHS Lanarkshire | 12.28% | £9,824,970 |
NHS Lothian | 14.97% | £11,976,356 |
NHS Orkney | 0.49% | £394,381 |
NHS Shetland | 0.48% | £380,909 |
NHS Tayside | 7.80% | £6,239,202 |
NHS Western Isles | 0.66% | £526,432 |
Total | 100.00% | £80,000,000 |
Additional funding from Scottish Government: £25.85M
In addition, the Scottish Government also provided £25.85 million of additional national investment into services to support the Boards beyond the £80 million allocation. This included:
Scottish Ambulance Service: £1.1 million
For a mobile vaccination outreach service to support the territorial Boards. This service is utilised by Boards to target specific communities where uptake is low, such as areas of high SIMD, or ethnic communities, as well supporting delivery in remote and rural areas.
NHS National Services Scotland (NSS): £20 million
This funded the National Contact Centre, which operates the National Vaccination Helpline for booking, rescheduling and cancelling flu and Covid appointments for those who did not wish to use, or cannot use, the online booking portal. The helpline also gives a range of other information on the programme and provided outbound calling services to boards. It also supported digital vaccination services such as the online booking portal for Covid and flu, as well the national vaccination scheduling service.
NHSl Education Scotland (NES): £2 million
This funded additional digital services for the recording and storage of national vaccination uptake data via the vaccine management tool (VMT) and the vaccination National Clinical Data Store (NCDS). It also funded NES’s vaccination workforce education team, providing high quality training materials to vaccinators and health professionals, including a live vaccinator webinar for the winter 2023-24 flu and Covid programme.
Public Health Scotland: £2.75 million
For vaccination programme operational delivery co-ordination
Vaccine Supply Costs: 26 million
All costs regarding storage and distribution of COVID-19 and adult flu vaccines were met by the Scottish Government.
The Scottish Government has invested £14.4million in adult flu vaccine supplies and £11.6 million in child flu vaccine supplies. (Adult flu was also funded in part from Health Board baseline budgets to a total of £10.39 million.)
COVID-19 vaccines were procured by the UK Government on behalf of the four nations.