FOI Ref: FOI/2022/3916
You asked
Please supply the following information with a focus on pregnant women:
Influenza vaccination uptake by BAME compared to white ethnicity in pregnant women (or non pregnant women)
Yearly hospitalisation of BAME groups from Influenza disease compared to white ethnicity (of pregnant and non pregnant women)
We said
Thank you for your email.
ONS are not responsible for and do not hold statistics related to vaccination uptake for the influenza vaccination amongst pregnant women.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) produce a surveillance report on this subject Seasonal flu vaccine uptake in GP patients: monthly data, 2021 to 2022. They may be able to assist your enquiry regarding uptake by ethnicity.
For hospitalisations, in order to fulfil this request, we would need to use a high level of statistical skill and judgement as it is not possible to identify pregnant women from the Hospital Episode (HES) Dataset alone; from our latest work we believe we can only identify at best half of all pregnant women at a given time using HES only, with no guarantee that the pregnant women identified from that data are representative in terms of BAME/white group. To answer your query, we would need to be able to identify all pregnant women, which would require a complex data linkage exercise linking the HES data to the birth notifications dataset. This would also require ethical approval and permission to be sought before we could proceed as at the moment, we do not have a mandate to do so for anything else accept from Covid-19. Assuming we could then identify all pregnant women in 2021-2022, we would need to assess whether and if so, how well hospitalisation due to influenza is recorded by the National Health Service. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider the information you have requested to be not held.
NHS Digital may be better placed to answer your enquiry. They can be contacted via email at enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk. You may also want to contact PHS.FOI@phs.scot for Scottish Health data and Contact Us | HSC Public Health Agency (hscni.net) for Northern Ireland.