The Turas Vaccination Management
How we developed the Turas Vaccination Management and how this has changed the way we deliver vaccination programmes and record their implementation in Scotland.
Overview
In September 2020, the Scottish Government commissioned NHS Education for Scotland (NES) to develop a vaccination management tool to improve vaccination records in Scotland. Around that time, NES also created the National Clinical Data Store (NCDS) to safely store data while it was available to GPs and others health professionals.
The combination of these two projects was key to:
- standardise vaccination clinical workflows
- moving on from a paper-based system that involved multiple stages before patients got their vaccinations
Process
To develop the Turas Vaccination Management, NES worked in collaboration with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. NES also received input from Public Health Scotland, other health boards and stakeholders such as National Services Scotland (NSS) and the Scottish Government.
The first steps were:
- setting up a group of subject matter experts to establish the key data to record
- researching the user’s profile, including their location and how they would interact with the tool
With this information, we created a prototype with a simple, flexible vaccination flow that quickly provided us with feedback to tackle tool issues and improve its navigation.
The first recorded flu vaccination episode happened in early November 2020 as part of the pilot. Alongside feedback from pilot clinics, we conducted a remote usability study of the vaccination flow.
This information helped us identify a series of issues that were amended in only eight weeks.
The Turas Vaccination Management went live in December 2020.
We had an eight-week window for planning and capturing our minimum clinical data set for recording vaccination. We spent eight weeks iterating versions and getting user feedback from vaccinators.
Gavin Holt
Senior Product Manager at NHS Education for Scotland
The Turas Vaccination Management and COVID-19
Thanks to the Turas Vaccination Management tool, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic health boards and Public Health Scotland received vaccination information on an hourly basis thanks to the Turas Vaccination Management tool. The Scottish Government also received this information every day.
By the end of which we were able to pilot a minimum viable product (MVP) in flu clinics. Then we were ready to go live to support COVID vaccinations on the 8 December. It just kept growing and we've just continued to add features and functionality since then.
Gavin Holt
Senior Product Manager at NHS Education for Scotland
Impact
The tool was used in hundreds of vaccination centres, ranging from mass centres in sports stadiums to buses to home visits and GP clinics.
To date, the Vaccination Management Tool has recorded:
- approximately 32 million vaccination events
- approximately 31 million administered vaccines
- almost 5.3 million patients
The functionality of the app has been extended to support other vaccination programs since its inception. Since March 2022, the Vaccination Management Tool supports 12 diseases (including COVID and flu).
The future
We’re expanding our integrations with health boards. This will enable secondary care systems have access to their patients, vaccination information and the NCDS.
This page was updated on 5 February 2026.
