The Cohorting as a Service platform went live on the 20 October 2022. The service currently provides a service to the NHS England Vaccine Programme for COVID-19 and flu and will continue to evolve.

The Government will consider the conclusions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe alongside lessons learnt and relevant findings more generally, including in due course from the COVID-19 public inquiry, in looking at the best options for using technology to respond to any future pandemic.

The National Health Service COVID-19 app is currently available to those aged 16 or over in England and Wales and is an effective and anonymous contact tracing tool. It has been downloaded over 31.5 million times since its launch on 24 September 2020. As of December 2022, the app had 7.7 million users. It also enables users to check their symptoms and enter positive NHS-provided or private test results, as well as signposting to public health and policy advice. The App, which incorporates proportionate and appropriate data protection mechanisms, has been shown to help reduce the spread of COVID-19.

In June 2022, NHS Digital were in the process of improving the COVID-19 General Practice Extraction Service to ensure it could be used to identify and extract data on those patients considered at risk for COVID-19 and potentially eligible for specific interventions, such as therapeutics and vaccinations. This has now been developed and delivered by General Practice Information Technology systems, and now informs the identification of ‘at risk’ patients for support.

Strategic work to build a platform to assist with identification of patients for different interventions such as treatments and vaccines was fully underway in June 2022. The platform is called ‘cohorting as a service’ and pulls together available data sources to enable patients to be repeatably identified. This service securely identifies groups of people with shared characteristics from national health data, enabling tailored direct care to be delivered to improve health and social care outcomes.

The Government will continue monitoring the virus through maintaining surveillance studies such as the Office for National Statistics’ COVID-19 Infection Survey and other data sources, including genomic sequencing. The Government will keep all surveillance activities under review to ensure we have the capabilities to monitor waves of COVID-19 and defend against future variants.

From 1 November 2021 to 30 November 2021, the Department received 1,647 items of correspondence, including representations from stakeholders relating to vaccines. However, to identify those cases which referred to certification of the booster vaccination on the NHS App would incur disproportionate cost.

However, a record of the booster or third dose of the COVID-19 vaccination is now available in the NHS App.

We have now begun a new phase of living with the virus, as outlined in ‘COVID-19 Response: Living with COVID-19’ published on 21 February 2022. The Government will continue monitoring the virus through maintaining surveillance studies such as the Office for National Statistics’ COVID-19 Infection Survey and other data sources, including genomic sequencing. As a result, the Department and the UK Health Security Agency are no longer in a position to fund the ZOE COVID study and REACT-1 study.

Booster vaccinations remain available, including for those who received primary doses in the European Union. The minimum dosage interval for booster vaccinations is three months from a final primary dose. Doses do not have to be recorded in the NHS App in order to access vaccination.

Vaccines approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency administered overseas can be recorded via the National Booking Service or 119. Doses can be verified at a face-to-face appointment at a designated vaccination centre and updated within the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS). If an individual’s overseas vaccination is recorded in NIMS, they will automatically be invited to receive a booster dose when eligible. Vaccinations can also be accessed at a walk-in centre without the record being updated in advance.

If an individual moves from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland where they were previously registered with a general practitioner (GP) and registers with a new GP in England, this vaccination data may not appear in the NHS COVID Pass. In these circumstances, individuals should book a face to face appointment at a selected list of vaccination centres in England. This service registers vaccines administered in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland and overseas. Following an appointment, the NHS COVID Pass should record these doses within five days.

Since 3 February 2022, children aged 12 years old and over can obtain a digital NHS COVID Pass for international travel. The pass is available via NHS.UK for those aged 12 years old and over and via the NHS App for those aged 13 years old and over. The digital NHS COVID Pass provides a record of COVID-19 vaccinations received and evidence of natural immunity for 180 days following a positive National Health Service polymerase chain reaction test.

No formal assessment has been made. However, the Overseas Vaccines Validation Service has been established for individuals to register their vaccinations with the National Health Service in England. Depending on the vaccine received overseas, they may also access the NHS COVID Pass. There are now 54 vaccination centres offering this service in England and approximately 6,000 appointments available per week.

Third vaccinations are currently recorded in the same section as booster doses in the NHS App. The functionality was immediately available at the start of the booster vaccination programme and is clinically accurate in recording details of the vaccine received. This information is updated on general practitioner records and the NHS COVID Pass.

More than 87% of the severely immunosuppressed cohort has received a third primary dose. An assessment of retrospectively updating records in the immediate future was made and it was determined that this could risk data quality issues. We are reviewing plans to record third primary doses via the NHS App in the longer term.

NHS Digital has established bi-directional live data flows between England and Scotland which update the general practitioner (GP) record and NHS COVID Pass status. Individuals who have received one or both of their primary course vaccines in Scotland can access the NHS COVID Pass, provided they are registered with a GP in England or otherwise have an National Health Service number. Individuals do not need to attend an appointment to ensure their NHS COVID Pass status is updated, as this should happen automatically.

The NHS COVID-19 App is primarily a contact tracing app. Users are anonymous so it cannot be used as proof of vaccination status. The NHS App provides access to a range of services including the NHS COVID Pass.

The data is not held in the format requested as there is no single definition or measure for active users.

The National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 app cannot currently provide differentiated advice between positive cases of the Delta and the Omicron variants. Where the app notifies an individual that they have had close contact with someone with COVID-19, it provides advice based on the information the user provides about their age and vaccination status. We are currently exploring whether the underlying technology the NHS COVID-19 app uses for contact tracing could enable the app to provide differentiated messages to users based on the probable COVID-19 variant of the person they were recently in close contact with.

A third primary vaccination dose for patients defined as severely immunosuppressed is recorded in the Point of Care system, and appears on the NHS App, as a booster, with the booster (fourth dose) recorded as a second booster. The classification of a third dose in the NHS App does not preclude a patient from receiving a booster, nor will it impede access to any subsequent vaccinations they might require. Eligibility is based upon the patient being identified as severely immunosuppressed rather than on the number of vaccinations they have received. If a patient has been identified by a clinician as being eligible for a third primary dose or a booster dose, the Point of Care system will not be a barrier to vaccination.