Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness - SIVEII
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Effectiveness II (SIVE II): Use of a large national primary care and laboratory-linked dataset to evaluate live attenuated and trivalent inactivated influenza vaccination effectiveness
IRAS ID
164826
Contact name
Colin Simpson
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The University of Edinburgh Research & Innovation
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 5 months, 1 days
Research summary
In Scotland a new policy on influenza is due to be introduced to ensure more people are vaccinated. A new type of influenza vaccine (live attenuated influenza vaccine) is being introduced to all children between 2 and 17 years. However, it can be difficult to evaluate any changes in health as a result of new immunisation programmes given that randomised controlled trials of the vaccine are impractical and can also be seen as unethical. These policy changes therefore are typically not evaluated, making it difficult to inform future policy in this field. We have a substantial track-record of evaluating vaccine programmes using information from linked healthcare electronic records [SIVE: bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/2/e001019.full?]. We now plan to conduct the world’s first evaluation of this new policy change. We will also evaluate the effectiveness of the vaccine programme for other groups where the evidence available is limited (e.g. people 65 years and older and people with asthma). We will extract information, about influenza vaccination and other relevant health information, from 500 general practices (half of the practices in Scotland) and the Scottish Immunisation Record System. We aim firstly to link these data to information on swabs collected by general practitioners (and from hospitals) to detect influenza in children from 2013 and all people from 2000 to 2015 and stored by Health Protection Scotland and then also link information to hospital and death records. This will provide us with sufficient information to carry out the evaluation.
REC name
West Midlands - Edgbaston Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/WM/0035
Date of REC Opinion
22 Jan 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion