Back in March this year the newspapers reported that NHS England was proposing a consultation banning the use of a number of medicines given in general practice which were deemed to be of low priority and within this list was the suggestion about travel vaccines. Well a consultation is now out reviewing the issue but overall it wasn’t as dramatic as anticipated. In brief it has been proposed that hepatitis B and meninigitish ACWY vaccine for travel purposes are made private – whereas at the current time it depends on the individual GP practice whether they chose to charge for these vaccines or not. Simplifying this aspect of travel would make like easier for us! The vaccines we thought may be made private – namedly hepatitis A, typhoid, polio and cholera are not included in the consultation but Public Health England have been asked to to conduct a review of travel vaccines currently available on the NHS to assess their appropriateness for future NHS prescribing. To read more about this – see my April and August articles in Practice Nurse at /about/publications/travel-health-update/
