The Exercise is to provide quality data, as part of the quality measure for a campaign and to determine the achievement of target as a true coverage of the exercise.

 

Dr Kwame Amponsa-Achianu, Programme Manager, Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI), GHS at a press briefing in Accra, said the exercise was significant because the data would be needed to make informed decisions. 

“We need that data to inform us on not just who were vaccinated, but when they got vaccinated, whether there were or how they even heard of it.

And if they were not vaccinated, why were they not vaccinated, these are important sets of data that help us to make informed decisions in our next campaign, not just for measles and rubella, but for other vaccination exercises,” he stated.

 

He indicated that in such campaigns, health workers have been trained and sent to the field to execute the vaccination and once that is done, a third party is sent to the field to survey and verify what they did. 

“The exercise has a target of achieving 95 per cent of the children. So, we will take that data from the administrative level while the sub-districts will report to the district and they will also report to the region, then, we get a national coverage,” he added.

 

Dr Amponsa-Achianu, who is also the Head of the Disease Control Department, GHS disclosed that in order to ensure a proper survey to validate the national coverage, field officers, mainly health workers had been trained to execute the exercise effectively, saying “The exercise is a representative of the whole country, hence training for field officers is necessary.

The five-day exercise would begin from the 8th of October and end on the 12th of October and some households have been pre-selected for the coverage all over the country, in a very scientific manner.

The Programme Manager urged the public to ensure total cooperation by giving them attention and answering a few questions regarding the vaccination exercise.

 

The field officers include doctors, nurses, and other allied health care workers who are in their practice, students, and experts from the Ghana Statistical Service database.

 

He made it known that the about 150 field officers would go in pairs in a team of about 60-65 and would be deployed across all the regions.

Measles and rubella had ravaged children over the past several years until, in about the late 90s when vaccine coverage improved.

The GHS started the expanded program on immunization in 1917 and since then coverage has been going up. 

 

Muniratu Akweley Issah