Seasonal Flu Vaccination

The flu vaccine helps protect against flu, which can be a serious or life-threatening illness. It’s offered on the NHS every year in autumn or early winter to people at higher risk of getting seriously ill from flu.

Who is eligible?

The flu vaccine is recommended for people at higher risk of getting seriously ill from Flu.

It’s offered on the NHS every year in autumn or early winter.

You can get the free NHS flu vaccine if you:

• are aged 65 or over
• have certain long-term health conditions
• are pregnant
• live in a care home
• are the main carer for an older or disabled person, or receive a carer’s allowance
• live with someone who has a weakened immune system

Frontline health and social care workers can also get a flu vaccine through their employer.

If you would like to know more about the Flu vaccine for adults you can visit the NHS website for details.

Who is being offered COVID-19 vaccination?

COVID-19 is more serious in older people and in people with certain underlying health conditions. This winter it is expected that many respiratory infections, including COVID-19 and flu may be circulating at high levels – this may put increasing pressure on hospitals and other health care services.

For these reasons, people aged 65 years and over, those in older adult care homes, and those aged 6 months and over in clinical risk groups are being offered a COVID-19 vaccine from October (please see pages 24 – 26 for a table of clinical risk groups here).

The vaccination programme is targeted at those at high risk of the complications of COVID-19 infection, who may have not been vaccinated for a few months. As the number of COVID-19 infections may increase over the winter, this should help to reduce your risk of being admitted to hospital with COVID-19. The vaccine may also provide some protection against mild COVID-19 infection but such protection does not last for long.