Everything has changed this year driven by new HSE guidelines.

Summary of the HSE Guidelines: 

• Consent reviewed in advance, day-of forms refused — HSE state they’ll be “advising vaccinators not to accept consent forms given to them on the day of vaccination,” and providers must “ensure all consent forms are reviewed in advance of the vaccination clinic before attending the school.”
• Withdrawal contact route required — providers must “provide sufficient contact details… to allow parents/legal guardians to engage further or withdraw consent as required.”
• Identity double-checks for similar names — explicit requirement where a child “has a similar name to another child or identifies by a different name to that on the consent form.”
• Same-day records — providers must “enter vaccination records on to the respective ICT system on the day of vaccination.”
• Sign and produce on request — both parties “are required to sign the relevant section,” and providers “may be required to provide a copy of this agreement to the HSE on request.”

NEW School Vaccination Hub

Building on our three years of experience working with hundreds of pharmacies across nearly 1,000 schools, the NEW School Vaccination Hub distils real-world learning into a solution designed around how Irish pharmacies actually deliver school vaccination programmes.

The School Vaccination Hub is an end-to-end platform designed to make school vaccination clinics simpler, faster and more accurate—from Consent to Completion. It brings paperless parent consent, advance clinic preparation, class and student organisation, review of special considerations, clinic-day vaccination recording and post-clinic reconciliation into one streamlined workflow.

More details here.

We are Retiring Last Year’s School Booking Process

With the new season approaching, we’re retiring the workflow used for school vaccination bookings last year. If you ran school clinics in 2025/26, you’ll recognise the friction: there was no clean way to remove a child from the wait list once they’d registered — deleting the entry or setting an appointment time were the only options — so a parent withdrawing consent by phone often meant extra calls and follow-up on your end.

The class and teacher labels only got you part of the way to an organised clinic list, and because every school needed its own link and appointment type set up individually, there was always a risk of links or details getting crossed between schools. 

On top of that, the HSE has tightened what’s expected for the coming season — consent now needs to be captured alongside medical screening, withdrawal has to be straightforward for parents at any point, and queries need to be resolved before clinic day rather than dealt with on the day. The 2025/26 process was built as a workaround on our general booking system, and it simply wasn’t designed to handle those requirements reliably as things scale. That’s why we’ve built a dedicated schools workflow for this season rather than stretching last year’s setup further.

PS: we will make accomodations for pharmacies who use the booking engine mainly for in-pharmacy appointments. Rather than a dedicated link per school, the consenting adult enters the school name into a free text field on the intake form. This really only suits pharmacies handling a handful of small schools. If that’s you, get in touch and we’ll set it up.