COVID-19 Autumn Winter 2025 campaign: Cohort identification methodology

The NHS England Vaccination Programme commissioned NHS England Vaccine Digital Services to make patient identifiable data available to their Data Processing Service and Foundry.

This data is to be used within the COVID-19 Autumn Winter 2025 campaign for:

• call and recall
• reporting
• monitoring purposes

NHS England Vaccination Programme commissioned NHS England Cohorting as a Service (CaaS) to provide patient identifiable cohorts for the immunosuppressed groups as outlined in tables 3 and 4 of Chapter 14a of the Green Book.

NHS England Vaccine Digital Services and NHS England Vaccination Programme have indicated that the following patients are suitable for clinical assessment for a COVID-19 vaccine:

• Patients within the immunosuppression clinical risk group
• Patients in the 75 years or older clinical risk group

A patient cohort has been created and made available in NHS England’s Cohort Processing System to enable the national call and recall process. The data will be available to Foundry for call and recall, monitoring and reporting purposes, to enable the national call and recall process.

Clinical risk groups within scope of this digital cohort development will receive invitations to receive a COVID-19 Autumn Winter 2025 vaccination (as specified by NHS England). These are:

• adults aged 16 years and over diagnosed with immunosuppression
• children 6 months to 15 years inclusive diagnosed with immunosuppression
• age based cohorting - people aged 75 years or over before 31 March 2026

This document outlines NHS England’s CaaS approach to deliver this cohort using established methodologies.

Data sets used are:

• General Practice Extraction service (GPES) v5: COVID-19 at risk patients data collection version 5
• Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database
• OPCS-4: Classification of Interventions and Procedures
• Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) Dataset
• Radiotherapy Treatment Data Service (RTDS)
• Personal Demographics Service (PDS)

All those aged 6 months or older in the clinical risk groups shown in tables 3 and 4 of Chapter 14a of the Green Book. 

All those age 75 years and over.

The code set used within the GPES and GDPPR data sets is:

• SNOMED CT: Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine

The code sets for Hospital Episodes are:

• International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision
• OPCS-4: Classification of Interventions and Procedures