GHS to conduct 2-week immunisation programme
The Ghana Health Service (GHS) will, from Monday, June 30, conduct a two-week Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) Coverage survey to assess how many children under five have received vaccines.
The exercise, which targets 1.3 million children under five, is aimed at helping to verify administrative data, identify coverage gaps, document reasons for non-vaccination and recommendations to improve immunisation services.
When completed, the survey would provide reliable evidence on immunisation performance, help identify under-vaccinated populations, and support efforts to improve vaccine delivery and disease prevention across Ghana.
The acting Programmes Manager, Dr Selorm Kutsoati, at a press briefing in Accra yesterday, appealed to the public to cooperate with the trained data collectors when they visited their homes to generate quality data that could be used by the service to plan.
She explained that the survey was crucial since the data would help to prevent issues of vaccination shortage.
Data collectors
She said the data collection would be carried out by trained 160 data collectors and 40 supervisors from the Ghana Statistical Services, University of Ghana Medical School and Public Health Nurses Training School - Korle Bu, under the supervision of the GHS with support from national and regional health teams and technical partners.
She indicated that the data collectors, who have undergone a three-day intensive training, would together with their supervisors be given Identification Cards with the embossment of the GHS, as well as letters from the service.
"By entering the communities directly and identifying vaccinated children, health authorities hope to correct data inaccuracies and better plan for future vaccine supply and delivery,” she said.
She said the survey was expected to guide the expansion of health infrastructure, such as adding more outreach posts, increasing staff and creating new Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) zones in underserved areas.
Visits
The Deputy Programmes Manager for the EPI, Dr Naziru Tanko Mohammed, said the data collectors would be visiting pre-selected households to interview caregivers of children under five and review immunisation cards and records.
He said the visits would include weekends to ensure that caregivers who might have been at work would be reached.
“When they get to a household and there is a need to reschedule a time that is a bit convenient to the person, the data collectors have been trained on how to do that,” he added.
He indicated that the supervisors were also to serve as the first checkpoint to ensure that the data collected in the field was of high quality.
“The supervisors will serve as the first checkpoint to ensure that the data is reviewed before it is sent to the national level, where experts in data and surveys will also run checks to ensure that any data inconsistencies and inaccuracies are corrected before they leave the field,” he said.
Dr Tanko stated that the service was adopting some remote tools at the national level to track the data collectors to pick their data.
“Using these geo-enabled technologies, we are very optimistic that the data we get will be of high quality that can inform policy and planning for the programme implementation,” he said.
