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Week 86: Red books

Posted by
Frankie Roberto
Published
Photo of two A5-sized red books stacked on top of each other, with the cover containing the tile 'My personal child health record' and a drawing of a teddy bear.

This week I got a stark reminder of the importance of vaccinations, in the form of a text message from my kids’ school about increasing measles cases in North London.

The message linked to a PDF of a letter from our local Integrated Care Board (ICB) which tell us to:

  1. Learn about the signs and symptoms of measles
  2. Check if our children (and us) have had the MMR vaccination
  3. Arrange MMR vaccination if needed, either through the GP or at one of the local catch up clinics
  4. Notify the school if you think your child may have measles, and call your GP or NHS 111

It is alarming stuff.

Checking whether your children have had both doses of the MMR vaccine isn’t currently easy. I was pretty confident ours had, but thought I’d see how easy it was to verify (let’s face it, those first few years of parenting are a bit of a sleep-deprived blur).

Your first port of call is the red book. These were given to us by midwives shortly after our kids were born, and were dutifully taken to all the early health appointments for check ups, weighing and vaccinations. But I’ve not looked at them for many years now, so I had to dig them out from a pile of old paperwork at the top of a wardrobe.

Within the book, the MMR vaccinations are on page 19s and 20 (for us at least), with the hand written notes giving the date, venue and details of the vaccination (product, batch number, and ‘LA’ indicating left arm). I also discovered the folded information leaflet from the vaccine, tucked into the sleeve of the book.

If you’ve set up proxy access for your children (which itself is a bit of a faff), you can instead check their vaccination history within the NHS app. To do this you have to select ‘Manage health services for others’, select a child, then go to the GP health record section and look under ‘Immunisations’.

In our case, the immunisations section lists 34 items for our eldest child (age 10). Some of these are actual vaccinations, but others seem to be vaccination-related notes, like ‘Full consent for vaccination’, ‘Recommendation to have child immunised against poliomyelitis’ or in one case just the single word ‘Immunisations’.

My kids’ MMR vaccinations are listed as ‘Measles/mumps/rubella vaccn.’ in one case, ‘First MMR (measles mumps and rubella) vaccination’ in another, and ‘Measles mumps and rubella booster vaccination’ in a third. This inconsistency is confusing and makes the history hard to scan.

If your don’t have proxy access set up, and can’t find the red book, the other option is to phone your GP and ask them to check. Hopefully they have good records for your children, but for adults they may not have - my GP seems to have no vaccination records for me except for the COVID-19 ones.

There is much to do to improve this. The NHS app needs to make it far easier and quicker to check your children are up-to-date with their vaccinations. Ideally you wouldn’t even have to remember to check, but could be notified when the vaccinations are due.

Thankfully, our teams are already on the case, with plans to improve the view of vaccinations in the app, make it easier to get proxy access set up, get better historic data on MMR vaccinations, and building services which let teams run some of the catch up vaccination clinics we’re seeing in response to outbreaks.

I’m proud to be playing a small role in supporting the design of this important work.

Enjoyed what felt like the first sunshine of 2026 this week!