JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In Cameroon, the coverage, completeness, and timeliness of EPI vaccines administration in children have remained heterogeneous and below the national and districts targets in several districts. In an effort to solve this problem, many interventions have been tested but none has shown significant improvement of the situation.

Objective:

Test whether involving Community Volunteers to assess children's vaccination status and demographic movements and using recorded data to plan catch-up immunization sessions can improve children's vaccination timeliness, completeness, and coverage.

Methods:

This is a cluster randomized controlled trial which aims to test whether involving Community Volunteers to assess children vaccination status and demographic movements and using recorded data to plan catch-up immunization sessions can improve children vaccination timeliness, completeness and coverage. Communities of the Foumban Health district, West region of Cameroon will be selected and assigned to either intervention or control groups using a restricted randomization of 2. In the intervention group, one Community Volunteer per community will be trained to visit households and record EPI targeted children in a register, their demographic movements and assess at monthly base their immunization status monthly for a year. The information recorded will be snapped and sent to the competent health center immunization team through WhatsApp. These will be used to plan and implement monthly community catch up immunization sessions in collaboration with the community volunteer. In the control group, the routine immunization sessions will be conducted with health centers organizing either weekly vaccination sessions for communities situated not farther than 5 kilometers away from the health facility or monthly vaccination sessions in communities situated more than 5 kilometers away from the health center. Baseline, mid-term and end-line surveys will be conducted to assess and compare immunization coverage, timeliness and completeness.

Results:

Discussion: This trial is expecting to test an innovative approach to improving children’s immunization timeliness, completeness and coverage by tracking EPI targeted population vaccination status and denominator at household level and building collaboration between the community and health facilities vaccination teams to organize monthly community-based response vaccination sessions.

Conclusions:

This intervention is expected to improve children sustainable access to EPI vaccination as it offers assessing and responding to their immunization needs at monthly basis using low cost local human resources. Clinical Trial: Pan African Clinical Trials Registry PACTR201808527428720. Prospectively registered 22 August 2018.