You can receive the vaccine at a GP surgery, sexual health clinic, antenatal clinic or some travel clinics. The currently available vaccines are very effective, with around nine out of every 10 people responding to a course of vaccine.
There are three different schedules for hepatitis B vaccine:
Standard schedule. An initial injection followed by another a month later and a third four months after that (0, 1 and 5 months).
A one-off booster is usually administered just once, five years later.
Accelerated schedule. An initial injection followed by one a month later and a third a month after that (so three injections at 0, 1 and 2 months).
This schedule was originally developed for health care workers and is now often used for injecting drug users.
A fourth dose should be administered at 12 months.
Super-accelerated schedule. An initial injection followed by one seven days later and a third 14 days after that (0, 7 and 21 days).
This is only usually done in exceptional circumstances; often for injecting drug users.
A fourth dose is recommended at 12 months.
Boosters. Many vaccination programmes recommend a booster just to be sure.
It is important to complete the course of injections to ensure the vaccine has the best chance of providing you with immunity to hepatitis B. If you do not have all three injections you may not be immune to the virus.
If you are one of the 10% who do not respond to vaccine, you can repeat the schedule one more time to see if immunity can be achieved. Sometimes this is successful.
A true non-responder will not achieve immunity no matter how many times they receive a course of vaccine.
