Keeping Your Children's Vaccinations Up to Date

 Courtesy of NSW Health

For parents who are migrating to Australia or have already arrived in Australia with their kids who were born overseas, you need to see a General Practitioner (GP) regarding your children's' vaccinations. As vaccinations schedules vary from country to country, your children would not be up to date with their vaccinations as per Australian standards. 

Why is it important to have them vaccinated? Your children will not be able to attend school nor childcare if you do not have any proof (documentation) that your child is up to date. The official document is released by the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register (ACIR) which you can either download from the Medicare website or have it printed if you go to a Medicare Centre. ACIR is a goverment agency tasked to collate all information regarding childhood vaccinations from aged 0-7. Recently, they have increased their coverage and they now collate information for children aged 0-19 years old. They have also changed their name to Australian Immunisation Register (AIR). In addition, they are linked with Centrelink. If you are getting payments through Centrelink, and your child is not currently up to date with their vaccinations, Centrelink will send you a reminder letter to have your children vaccinated, otherwise they will stop your payments.

How to get your kids up to date with their vaccinations:

Go to the nearest medical centre and see a GP. (Important note: Bring your children's vaccination history statement e.g. baby's book or a document from their Paediatrician overseas). The GP will then have a look at your children's vaccination records and create a catch-up schedule for them and vaccinate your children.

In the medical centre that I work at, GPs refer all children who are for catch-up vaccinations to me or to the other nurse since we are both certified nurse immunisers. This means, we officially had training regarding Australian Immunisations and we are up to date with the changes regarding immunisations, so we are qualified to create and execute the catch-up immunisations that the patient needs. Since this is a tedious process, we normally photocopy the records, get the parents' mobile number and we call them back once we have created the catch-up schedule. The catch-up schedule is based on the Australian Immunisation Handbook 10th Edition 2013. If your children's vaccination records is a bit complicated, we do ask the help of the Public Health Unit (PHU). They then create the catch-up schedule and we then receive information about this and we then execute their catch-up schedule. We also send out the overseas vaccinations together with the catch-up vaccinations (if they were already given if not we tick a box saying that a catch-up schedule is being followed) to ACIR using the Australian Childhood Immunisation history form once everything is sorted out, which is signed by the GP, via fax or snail mail. But what we normally do is we fax and post this document to be sure that they will receive a copy of the information. It takes about 1-2 weeks for the information to be reflected on the Medicare website. 

If you really want your kids to go to school straight away and the information is not yet reflected on Medicare, you can ask for a photocopy of the Australian Childhood Immunisation form from the GP or the nurse. As according to PHU, parents can give this document as proof of child being up to date with vaccinations.