Childhood Vaccinations - Essential information

Babies and pre schoolers will usually get their jabs at their GP surgery. School age children will often get their jabs via the school nursing teams.

• Dress your baby in clothes that are easy to remove. Babies have injections in their thigh
• Dress toddlers and older children in loose or short sleeves. They'll usually have their injections in their arm
• Stay calm during the vaccination. It's natural to worry but it might make your child anxious
• Let your child know what's going to happen in simple language, for example, "you may feel a sharp scratch that will go away very fast"
• Hold your child on your knee during the injection. If you're worried about seeing injections you could ask a nurse or another member of staff to hold them for you
• Distraction helps. You can get your child to take a deep breath and pretend to blow bubbles. You could bring a favourite toy or book with you
• Try not to apologise to them for their injections as it helps if your child thinks of injections as a good thing
• You may want to bring a reward for them to have afterwards

It may help your child if you have spoken to them about what to expect before their appointment. 

Videos for children which may help prepare them for their jabs:

Pre-school children: How Do Injections Help You? by Dr Ranj

School age children: Operation Ouch’s Dr Chris and Dr Xand explain what vaccines are

For more information on vaccine tips for parents.

All children between 2 and 11 years of age should receive the children's flu vaccine. This is not only to stop them getting unwell with flu, but also to stop them spreading flu to other members of your family.

There are other groups of children with long term health conditions that should have the flu vaccine every year. This includes children with weakened immune systems (including those on steroids or with problems with their spleen), chronic heart or lung problems, diabetes, asthma, chronic kidney or liver disease. It is especially important that these children are vaccinated because they have the greatest risk of becoming very unwell if they get flu. Children aged from 6 months to 2 years who are at risk from complications of flu should be given the inactivated (injected) flu vaccine rather than the intranasal vaccine.

Common myths about flu and the flu vaccine

'Flu isn't serious, so my child doesn't need a flu vaccine' and 'My children never get ill, so they don't need the vaccine'

It is tempting to think that flu is no worse than a bad cold. In fact it is a serious disease which can infect anyone and can cause serious complications. For people at risk of complications e.g. grandparents or other vulnerable household members, flu can lead to hospitalisation or even death. Flu leads to hundreds of thousands of GP visits and tens of thousands of hospital stays a year.

'Last year my children had the flu vaccine but they got ill anyway, so it doesn't work'

No vaccine is 100% effective, including the flu vaccine. However, the vaccine usually prevents about half of all flu cases. For people who get flu after being vaccinated, the disease is often milder than it would have been. It is important to remember that the flu vaccine only protects against flu. There are other illnesses which have flu like symptoms which you can still catch after getting the flu vaccine. It takes up to 2 weeks for the vaccine to take effect, so you could still catch flu during this time. Getting vaccinated as early as possible in the season can help to prevent this.

Unfortunately, as these vaccine preventable infections become less and less common, social media coverage on vaccines increasingly focuses on their side effects and adverse reactions.

The MMR vaccine does not cause autism. Sadly, several years ago incorrect information about this caused parents to worry. This led to a drop in the number of children getting their MMR vaccine.

We are now seeing more and more cases of measles in the UK and Europe. This has resulted in severe illness and even deaths in a number of adults and children.

You may think that your child will be protected by herd immunity (other people being vaccinated around them). This is no longer the case with MMR because far less than the required 95% of the population are being vaccinated.

In addition, if your child travels abroad (even when they are an adult) or comes into contact with someone with measles who is visiting from abroad, they will be completely unprotected and may contract the illness.

Measles is highly infectious and is spread by water droplets, coughed or sneezed by infected individuals.

More information about the safety of the MMR vaccine and parent stories can be found on the Vaccine Knowledge Project website by the University of Oxford.

It’s normal to have questions about any medication that you’re giving to your child and vaccines are no different. The most common questions that parents ask are:

Why should I have my child vaccinated?

Won’t herd immunity protect them? Herd immunity does not protect against all diseases.

The best example of this is tetanus. Tetanus is caught from bacteria in the environment, not from other people who have the disease.

For herd immunity to work properly, most people in the population need to be vaccinated. There are low vaccination rates in some parts of the UK and in some communities, as well as in many overseas countries. This means that if your child is not vaccinated, it is quite likely that many of the people they come into contact with will also not be vaccinated. So if one person gets an infectious disease, it can spread quickly through all the unvaccinated people in the group (this happened during the 2013 measles outbreak in Wales).

Won’t having several vaccines at the same time overload my baby’s immune system?

Parents often worry that a child’s immune system will not be able to cope with several vaccines at once. In fact, even a tiny baby’s immune system can cope easily.

Starting from birth, babies come into contact with millions of germs every day. It is estimated that the human body contains enough white blood cells to cope with thousands of vaccines at any one time.

If a child was given 11 vaccines at once, it would only use about a thousandth of the immune system.

It is not a good idea to delay vaccinations, it leaves your child unprotected against serious diseases for longer.

How do I know that vaccines are safe?

All vaccines go through a long and thorough process of development and testing before they are licensed for use.

Vaccines have to be tested on adults and children separately before they can be used for different age groups. This is because vaccines that work in adults may not work so well in children.

No vaccines are tested on children before they have been fully tested on adults. Click here for more information about vaccine safety and side effects.

Visit the Oxford Vaccine Group website for more information about common questions, concerns and comments that people have about vaccines.