The World Health Organization has said that it’s collaborating with the Federal Government to immunize 930,000 children per year in order to increase the country’s uptake of routine immunization.
Dr. Kofi Boateng, WHO Team Lead, Vaccine Preventable Diseases and Polio Eradication, at an engagement program on optimized outreach organized by the National Primary Healthcare Development Agency with other development partners in Abuja.
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According to Boateng, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an estimated 33 million African children not being immunized between 2019 and 2021.
e said, “The fact that these children had not received any vaccine is the reason why we are seeing a lot of outbreaks like measles, diphtheria, yellow fever and so on. As part of preparation for the African vaccination week celebration, which is riding on the theme ‘the big catch up’, this meeting is to support Nigeria to prepare to catch up to about 6.2 million Nigerian children that did not receive any vaccine from 2019 to 2021 in Nigeria.”
He noted that the Federal Government and other development partners are reviewing strategies that the states were going to adopt to make sure that all health facilities intensify the outreaches to catch up on the unimmunised children.
Boateng stated that the most effective strategy realised was the need to take the vaccination to the people through fixed sessions, outreach sessions and mobile sessions for specific groups of populations based on their proximity to the health facility.
“What we have noticed in Nigeria for the outreach sessions that are supposed to go to the communities, we are not seeing the number of yield in terms of the number of children vaccinated over a longer period.
“We are discussing the issue of partners supporting the state in terms of resourcing, engaging the state authorities to make sure the funds are released to support this plan. In the WHO, we have presence in all the 36 states and we also have staff in almost every ward supporting polio eradication and other PHC services. So we will leverage that to support the government to make sure all plans at those levels are of high quality.
“WHO supports strategic policy, we also monitor what is happening. We have the teams in the fields that would be supporting the state in terms of coordination, planning and implementation.
“In terms of implementation, we are going to participate in the training of health workers. We are going to monitor the progress of the process. We’re also going to assess the quality of services as a result of the outreach in terms of data on the actual number of children that are going to be vaccinated.
“We are hoping that by the end we have as partners with the government we have agreed that every year we’ll reduce the burden of zero dose by 15 per cent. We hope that by the end of this we’ll reduce that dose by that percentage,” Boateng said.
On his part, the Executive Director of NPHCDA, Dr Faisal Shuaib, disclosed that plans for special logistics had been made to take routine immunisation to hard to reach areas.
He noted that there is a need for a paradigm shift, for parents to make their children available to receive vaccines and for healthcare workers to optimise every available opportunity to reach children most especially in hard to reach communities.
Also, the Director Disease Control and Immunization, NPHCDA, Dr Bassey Okposen, noted that most states were not conducting outreaches as expected.
“We, therefore, drew up optimized strategies on how to make the outreaches better, sharing with them the optimised outreach strategy approach so they can do better.
“We’re also using the opportunity to talk to the states about the HPV vaccine,” he said.
The engagement programme was organised for representatives from the Federal Capital Territory and the 36 states in the country.
