Information for Registered Nurses and Nurse Practitioners
Registered nurses can perform immunisations on behalf of a practitioner. The provider number of the practitioner is then used for the purpose of transmitting data to Australian Immunisation Register (AIR), and the AIR notification payment is forwarded to the practitioner (who the nurse is performing the immunisation on behalf of).
Nurses can register as Ancillary Immunisation Providers for AIR purposes only (ie reporting vaccinations given to children), as in the case of a nurse who is performing immunisations in a remote location without a registered Medicare provider. The nurse needs to complete the 'Application to register as an immunisation provider' form and send it to their State or Territory health department for approval. The bank account details for the AIR notification payment are also completed on this form.
When the approved form is received by Medicare Australia, a unique identification number (Ancillary Provider Number) is allocated to identify the ancillary provider and the bank account details are processed onto the AIR for future AIR payments. The ancillary provider number is only recognised for the purpose of sending immunisation data to the AIR and is not linked in any way to MBS item numbers (10993, 10999).
Note: This differs to Nurse Practitioners who are able to immunise, prescribe, dispense and so on.
To Maintain Adult (patient >20 years of age) Immunisations
1. From the patient's Clinical Window, select the Imm. tab.
2. Then, to add an immunisation record, either
o Click
on the toolbar
o Press the F3 key
o Right-click in the list of immunisations (even if list is empty) and select New Item from the pop-up menu
3. The
Vaccination
window appears.
o Indicate whether the vaccine was administered elsewhere (Optional). This sets the Vaccinator drop-down list to 'Given Elsewhere'. The 'Vaccinator' and 'Consent provided by' fields remain disabled.
o Indicate whether you wish to forward this vaccination data to AIR. The Send to AIR check box will be ticked by default, if the following rules are met;
• Applies to any vaccine administered to a patient, that is approved for transmission by AIR.
• The vaccine must be administered at the surgery (i.e. not ‘declined’ or ‘given elsewhere’).
• MedicalDirector Clinical must be configured for sending vaccination data to your billing package, and;
· If you are linked to Pracsoft, you must also tick the 'Create Immunisations' check box, located in Links Options.
· If you are linked to a third-party billing package, you must also;
1 tick the 'Send details of immunisations recorded...' check box in Advanced Link Options.
2 Indicate the output path location for the vaccination data your billing package will read, also located in Advanced Link Options.
o Select the vaccinator from the drop-down list.
o Indicate who gave consent for the vaccination.
o Enter a the date on which the immunisation was administered.
o Select the type of immunisation from the list provided.
o Select the site at which the vaccination was administered.
o Enter the Sequence, Batch Number and any comments (if necessary). Note that in the example above we have enforced AIR batch number validation (via Advanced Link Options) and therefore batch numbers must contain only alpha-numeric characters (no spaces or punctuation).
o Indicate the Vaccine Funding Type.
o (Optional)
Click 
to generate a recall notification to have
the patient recalled for another immunisation in the future. ERROR: Variable (Recall_Management) is undefined.
4. Click
to
save the immunisation record and return to the patient's record.