Childhood Immunisation

When your baby was born they had borrowed protection against diseases from their mother. Sadly, this protection wears off over time and we need to give young children that protection back. This means they build their own long-lasting memories and immunity to some very serious, dangerous diseases without having to risk the real disease.
At eight weeks the mother’s protection against the following diseases is ending, and your baby is ready to begin making their own long lasting protection/immunity. The immunisations given at your babies 8 week appointment are the following:

Tetanus
Diphtheria
Meningococcal group B (MenB)
Whooping Cough
Polio
Rotavirus
Hepatitis B
Haemophilus Influenzae type b (Hib)

Our recall team will be inviting you in when your appointment is due. Here at Mildmay Medical Practice we invite you in for your post-natal appointment and baby check appointment on the same day as your baby’s 8 week immunisations, to avoid you having to attend multiple appointments. During the appointment if you would like to bring a favourite toy for your baby to chew/play with or give a short feed to them that is fine.

We are pleased to invite you back to the practice for your baby’s second set of immunisations. These are given at 12 weeks old, 4 weeks after your baby’s first set of immunisations.

Your baby’s body, since your last visit, has started to learn what some very serious and dangerous diseases look like, from the safe ‘look-a-likes’ we gave them.

It is important you bring your baby in as close to this date as possible as this next set is going to build on that learning and memory. By having four weeks between the immunisations, all the learning from the first set is complete and the body is ready to strengthen those new defences.

We will also give your baby a Pneumococcal injection, which like the others is a very safe version of another disease that is very dangerous to catch in it’s real form. Protection from mum for this is now going down so we need to replace it with baby’s own.

We are pleased to invite you back to the practice for the final memory boosting set of immunisations.

Having completed the first two sets, your baby has been building up strength and protection in their body to be able to fight some very nasty diseases. This last set is to ensure that the protection and memory of these diseases that your baby has been building over the last couple of months is long lasting.

There is nothing new in this visit, but as before we need to give this final set four weeks after the last to build the strongest protection for your baby as possible. It completes the body’s learning and memory building processes to quickly recognise the real disease and remove it, and ensures those important disease memories are as good as they can get.

It has been a while now since we began helping your child to build good strong defences against some very serious and dangerous diseases in a safe way so that they don’t have to suffer the real diseases.

When your child is one year old, their body is ready and able to build even more defenses against some other just as serious and dangerous diseases. The protection they had borrowed from their mum for measles, mumps and rubella is now going; luckily this lasts longer than for the other diseases.

So from their first birthday, we can put those defenses and protection back. As with all the immunisations we give it is built to create the defenses against the diseases in a safe way teaching the body what to look for without having to fight the real diseases, which can quickly take over the body.

Our nurse will give your child the MMR and we will also give a boost to the memories and defences we have already built for them with Meningitis B and C, pneumococcal and Haemophilus Influenzae B (Hib). This makes sure that if your child’s body has lost a tiny bit of memory as they have been growing that it is put back to full strength.

Feel free to bring along a toy, or book that your child likes to play with and/or a favourite treat to eat straight afterwards. And as always remember the Red Book.

It has been quite a while since we saw you both to help support your child to build lasting immune memories using very safe ‘look alike’ versions of the diseases.

 We are very pleased to invite you back to our practice for one final set of defence-boosting immunisations. This will complete the help we can give to your child’s body to build the best possible defences against some very serious, highly dangerous diseases.

This final set of immunisations gives the body a last boost in detecting the diseases quickly and removing them. Nothing is different inside the vaccines, they are the same ones that your child has had previously and cannot give your child the actual full-blown diseases.

For your child, the world is expanding now with new places to go and people to meet. This is a wonderful time for you all, but also a time when they will be exposed to lots of different bugs. To ensure your child’s body is completely ready if he/she comes into contact with any of the very serious dangerous diseases, we can help you protect against, it’s really important to have this last set of memory boosting immunisations.

We will top up your child’s ability to recognise and remove:

Diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps and rubella.

During the appointment if you would like to bring a favourite toy for your child to play with, or a favourite snack that is fine.