BJN Awards 2019: innovation runner up: creating a staff flu vaccination game

The Flu Bee Game is a digital quiz-style game designed to improve vaccination rates by engaging, educating and encouraging staff to get vaccinated. The game presents flu facts, busts vaccine myths and tells players where and how they can get vaccinated in their organisation. The game's content is based on challenging the top reasons that staff give for not getting vaccinated.

The Flu Bee Game is an HTML5 web app with a supporting website. The game works on any device through a web browser and only takes a few minutes to play. Players answer questions about flu and vaccination. If they get enough questions right and dodge the flu bugs, they build a ‘honeycomb path’ that leads them to ‘Queen Bee’ status. Players are also offered practical advice about where and when to get the vaccine in their organisation.

In the NHS and social care, it is vital that staff get their seasonal flu vaccination to protect themselves, family, colleagues and patients from the virus. In England, the target for NHS trusts in the coming season is to achieve 80% uptake of the vaccine among staff. However, many trusts have not achieved this level of uptake in previous seasons, which suggests that their campaigns need to be more effective at persuading staff to get vaccinated.