The groups eligible for flu vaccination in the 2024 to 2025 flu season from 1 September 2024 include:

• all children aged 2 or 3 years on 31 August 2024

• all primary school aged children (from reception to year 6)

• secondary school-aged children (years 7, 8 ,9, 10 and 11)

• those aged 6 months to under 18 years in clinical risk groups (as defined in the Green Book, Chapter 19 (Influenza))

• pregnant women

The groups eligible for flu vaccination in the 2024 to 2025 flu season from 3 October 2024 include:

• those aged 65 years and over (including those who are 64 but will be 65 on or before 31 March 2025)

• those aged 18 years to under 65 years in clinical risk groups (as defined in the Green Book, Chapter 19 (Influenza))

• those in long-stay residential care homes and other long-stay care facilities where rapid spread is likely to follow introduction of infection and cause high morbidity and mortality (this does not include, for example, prisons, young offender institutions, university halls of residence)

• carers in receipt of carer’s allowance, or those who are the main carer of an elderly or disabled person

• close contacts of immunocompromised individuals

• frontline workers in a social care setting without employer led occupational health schemes including those working for:

  • a registered residential care or nursing home

  • registered domiciliary care providers

  • voluntary managed hospice providers

  • those that are employed by those who receive direct payments (personal budgets) or Personal Health Budgets, such as Personal Assistants

All frontline health care workers, including both clinical and non-clinical staff who have contact with patients, should be offered influenza vaccine from 3 October as part of the organisations’ policy for the prevention of the transmission of influenza to help protect both staff and those that they care for.

Social care workers directly working with people clinically vulnerable to influenza should also have the influenza vaccine provided by their employer.

There are circumstances where frontline staff, employed by specific social care providers without access to employer led occupational health schemes (see above), can access the vaccine through the NHS free of charge.

The groups to be offered a COVID-19 vaccine in autumn/winter 2024/25 are:

• residents in a care home for older adults;

• all adults aged 65 years and over;

• persons aged 6 months to 64 years in a clinical risk group, as defined in tables 3 and 4 of the COVID-19 chapter of the UK Health Security Agency Green Book on immunisation against infectious disease; and

• frontline health and social care workers and staff working in care homes for older adults.

For the latter group, which will include community pharmacy staff, NHS England are asking employers to signpost these staff to the most convenient COVID-19 vaccination offer, which may be through NBS, where staff can self-declare their eligibility.