What are the CEG COVER dashboards?

March 7, 2024March 7, 2024

Understanding the scope of COVER dashboards- and the need for NEL data sets.

What is COVER?

COVER stands for Cover Of Vaccination Evaluated Rapidly
Started in 2005, so useful for long term trends, and for national comparisons
Standard measure of vaccine uptake in aged 0 to 5 – proxy measure of UK protection
Published online and available as a dashboard
In NEL: PID GP data from Discovery to CHIS to NHS Digital
CEG was commissioned to produce this data (faster than NHS Digital) to support enhanced services in the past but is no longer commissioned. We keep publishing out of good will. We follow NHSE’s rules in the same way as NHS Digital but do not include unregistered children
Cohorts change quarterly as per rules: children becoming 1, 2, or 5 in the quarter. And there is an extra report at the end of the financial year which includes all children becoming 1, 2, or 5 in the year

What COVER is not

COVER does not reflect impact of recent intervention or events. E.g. the effects of lockdown, which started in March 2020, for 1st MMR, did not show till 1 year later, and for pre-school boosters a year and a half later
It is not related to practice payment (QOF is)
It does not count number of vaccines given in a particular period (ImmForm does)
It cannot be used for basic call/recall (because it does not include all children, NEL practices should use the APL-Imms tool instead). It will not tell you how many children are unvaccinated, so it cannot be used to plan a catch up campaign

First MMR, 24m cohort, example

CEG COVER data – reference date 1st Jan 2024 (December 2023), 2023/24 Q3:

Patients becoming 24m within quarter: 1,350

Of those, 1,150 had had their first MMR

Does this mean that the number of children aged 2 who have not had their first MMR is 200? NO
It means that 200 children born between 1 Oct 2021 and 31 Dec 2021 had not had their 1st MMR
In fact, the number of registered children who were age 2 on the 31st of Dec 2023 in that Place was around 5,350 and about 700 of them had not had their MMR by that date. And if we wanted to target all children under age 6, we would have to look at those aged 3, 4 and 5 as well.