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NHS England plans to commission community pharmacies to provide whooping cough vaccinations under an enhanced respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and pertussis vaccination service.
A contract tender, published on 3 March 2025, details that the NHS is looking for up to 66 sites in three integrated care boards (ICBs) in the Midlands — NHS Black Country ICB, NHS Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland ICB and NHS Birmingham and Solihull ICB — to provide the vaccination service in the region.
The service will commence in May 2025 and run until March 2027, “with an option for the commissioner to extend for 24 months until 31 March 2029,” the contract tender said.
“The value of the service provision resulting from this procurement process will be an item of service fee of £9.58 for the administration of each RSV and pertussis vaccine to each eligible patient,” it added.
The vaccine for pertussis — also known as whooping cough — is currently offered to pregnant women from 16 weeks in general practice and NHS trusts.
However, the contract tender said that “where there are areas of identified additional need, the commissioner will commission community pharmacy to provide the pertussis vaccination programme opportunistically to pregnant women to supplement the core service provision”.
This is the second national enhanced service to be used to commission vaccination services from community pharmacies, following the COVID-19 vaccination service.
The contract tender’s publication comes as whooping cough cases in England increased by more than 1,600% in 2024, compared with the previous year, according to data from the UK Health Security Agency.
There were 14,905 whooping cough cases reported in 2024, compared with 856 cases in 2023. The total number of cases for 2024 exceeded the total in 2012 — the last major outbreak year — when 9,367 cases were reported.
Community pharmacies in the east of England have already been commissioned to provide the RSV vaccine to patients aged 75–79 years and women who were at least 28 weeks pregnant at the start of the vaccination programme in September 2024.
Between October and December 2024, these pharmacies administered 8,000 RSV vaccines to eligible patients.
Commenting on the contract tender, Alastair Buxton, director of NHS services at Community Pharmacy England (CPE), said: “The commissioning of further pharmacies to provide RSV and pertussis vaccinations, building on the great work of the early adopter pharmacies in the east of England, is a welcome and strategically significant development.
“We believe further commissioning of pharmacies to provide NHS vaccination programmes can help address falling vaccine coverage, particularly in relation to less well-served groups of the population.”
He added: “[CPE’s] agreement with NHS England to use a national enhanced service to commission a vaccination service in response to population needs is really positive news and is an approach we want to see repeated in the future.
“We believe such an approach can best support ICBs to easily commission community pharmacies to help address their populations’ unmet vaccination needs once ICBs take on delegated responsibility for vaccination commissioning in April 2026.”
In February 2025, a report from the Pharmacy Vaccinations Development Group argued that pharmacies offer “vital accessibility” for patients and, therefore, should be mobilised as part of efforts to increase declining UK vaccination uptake rates.
A spokesperson for NHS England told The Pharmaceutical Journal: “We know that vaccination is one of the best ways to boost public health, so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to get the vaccines they need. As set out in our vaccination strategy last year, our aim is to make getting a vaccination ‘as easy as booking a cab’.
“Providing the RSV vaccine through a number of pharmacies in the Midlands would make it more convenient for those aged 75–79 [years] to book and attend their vaccination appointments, and for pregnant women to attend walk-in appointments, and we look forward to expanding this pharmacy offer in the areas that need it most.”
