FluSurvey

How Does FluSurvey work?

Any member of the UK public aged 18+ can register onto the platform to report any respiratory symptoms they may experience.

When you register, you'll be asked to fill in a basic information questionnaire asking general questions about yourself and risk factors relevant to some diseases (for example, household size, age, and vaccination status). Then each week, you'll receive an email with a link to a questionnaire asking whether you've experienced symptoms in the past week. If you haven’t experienced any symptoms, we still ask you to complete the survey as this information is still valuable.

You can also take part on behalf of other people, for example household members (including children) can be added on to the primary account.

Participation is entirely voluntary, and information collected is confidential and used to better understand respiratory illness in the community, such as influenza and COVID-19. All analysis is carried out on anonymous datasets. For more information about how we handle data provided by FluSurvey participants, please see our privacy policy.

Data

This data will be used by researchers at UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to monitor disease trends in the UK.

We're always looking to increase our participation to make our data more robust and representative of the general population. If you have participated in previous years please do so again this year. We would be grateful if you could invite one or two new people to participate or share the word in your communities.

If you are new to this site please click on 'Register' on the top right of this page.

The data are collected and processed for the following purposes:

Monitoring self-reported respiratory symptoms, social contact patterns and health service usage in the general population in near-real time;
Carrying out scientific research and statistical analyses on the spread of infectious diseases in the UK and Europe;
Publishing weekly statistical analyses in the National flu and COVID-19 surveillance report and on the UKHSA data dashboard, which includes graphical representations of the results;
Providing you, the participant, with information about the survey results via the Updates and Results page;

The personal data that we may process for these purposes are:

Year of birth, month of birth, postcode, sex, family composition;
Background data relevant to the risk of infection, i.e. data about whether you belong to a risk group recommended for flu vaccination, occupation and lifestyle;
Data about symptoms provided in the symptoms questionnaire;

Please see our privacy policy for further details on how we process and protect your data.

Postal swabbing kits for surveillance

Respiratory self-swab testing may be available as part of our routine surveillance. It increases our understanding of the respiratory viruses in circulation in England. Postal self-swabbing will be available for a sample of participants with specific symptoms. Participation is voluntary and open to participants who live in England and are over 18 years.

If you are eligible you will be asked if you are interested in postal self-swabbing and provided with additional information. If you agree to proceed, you will be contacted by email and redirected to Take a Test UK, who will supply the self-swabbing kit. Testing is free of charge. Please note that you will receive certain test results (such as flu and COVID-19) but this test is not intended as a clinical diagnosis or to inform your treatment. The results will only be sent to you and not to your GP.

You should not delay seeking healthcare advice while waiting for the testing kit or test result. It will take approximately 2 weeks to receive test results by text message from Take a Test UK.