Setting default vaccines on an offering

Vaccination encounters pre-fill the Vaccination Episodes section from the service's default vaccine codes. An offering inherits those codes from its service definition by default; you can override them per offering when one bookable version of a service should pre-fill different vaccines than its siblings.

Typical reasons to override:

• Two Flu vaccination offerings — adult vs over-65 — pre-fill the right vaccine each.
• A campaign offering delivers a specific brand for a few weeks without forking the service definition.
• A generic offering should always require the operator to pick the vaccine themselves.

Before you start

• The site has at least one service offering against a service with AIR antigen codes (flu, COVID-19, RSV, and so on).
• You have permission to edit service offerings.

Where to find it

Go to Settings›Services, open the offering you want to configure, and look for the Encounter setup card in the offering detail. The card shows the current default behaviour at a glance — Inherit, Custom, or None — and a Manage button to change it.

The three modes

The manage sheet has three radio options:

• Inherit (default) — use the service definition's default vaccines.
• Custom — pick a specific list of vaccines for this offering to pre-fill. The checklist shows the vaccines configured for your pharmacy; if the one you want isn't there, widen the pharmacy defaults via the Manage pharmacy defaults link in the sheet. Reorder them so the most likely one shows up first at the encounter.
• None — no defaults pre-fill, even if the service definition has codes configured.

The card on the offering page summarises the current state and lists the vaccines when in Custom mode.

What this changes — and what it doesn't

• New services pre-fill from your override. When a booking, walk-in, or standalone service is created against the offering, it picks up your override first, falling back to the service definition's defaults if no override is set.
• Existing services keep what they were created with. Editing an offering's defaults doesn't retroactively change services already on existing bookings — same as price and duration.
• You can still change the pre-fill at the chair. The override only changes what's pre-filled when you start.
• It doesn't change what's claimable. Eligibility is still evaluated against the program rules at submission. See how claim eligibility checks work for the live preview.

When to use variants instead

If two offerings only differ in their default vaccines but share everything else (duration, price, availability, resources), a single parent offering with two variants is usually a better shape — each variant carries its own override and the shared rules stay in one place. The per-offering override is the right tool when the offerings already exist as siblings, or when their other configuration genuinely differs.