COVID Vaccine Campaign Spring Summer 2026
Cohorting as a Service (CaaS) provides cohorts of individuals eligible for vaccinations to Vaccine Digital Services based on agreed criteria. This is a description of the methodology used to identify individuals eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination during spring-summer 2026.
Overview
The NHS England Vaccination Programme commissioned NHS England Vaccine Digital Services to flow patient identifiable data to their Data Processing Service and Foundry.
This data is to be used within the COVID-19 spring 2026 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
- 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 (CPS) to enable the national call and recall process. The data will be available to Foundry for call and recall, monitoring and reporting purposes.
Eligible cohorts for Spring 2026 COVID-19 vaccination
Clinical at-risk groups within scope of this digital cohort development will receive invitations to present for a COVID-19 Spring 2026 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 30 June 2026
This document outlines NHS England’s Cohorting as a Service's (CaaS) approach to deliver this cohort using established methodologies. It also highlights any divergence from the clinical criteria held within tables 3 and 4 of Chapter 14a of the Green Book and associated assumptions.
Data sets used
Data sets used are:
- GPES (General Practice Extraction service) 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)
Demographics
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.
Coding classifications used
The code set used within the GPES and GDPPR data sets is:
The code sets for Hospital Episodes are:
Last edited: 20 April 2026 1:06 pm