Jérôme Ateudjieu, Ndinakie Martin Yakum, André,Pascal Goura, Etienne Guenou, Landry Bita’a Beyala, Lapia Amada, IsabelleNgoche, Frank Forex Kiadjieu, Charlette Nangue, Elvis Briand Soukep Djosseu, Bruno Kenfack.
Background:
In Cameroon, the coverage, completeness, and timeliness of the Expanded Programme on Immunization (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 thesituation.
Objective:
This trial aims to test whether involving Community Volunteers to assess children vaccination status and demographicmovements and using recorded data to plan catch-up immunization sessions can improve children vaccination timeliness,completeness and coverage.
Methods:
Communities of the Foumban Health district, West region of Cameroon will be selected and assigned to eitherintervention or control groups using a restricted randomization of 2. In the intervention group, one Community Volunteer percommunity will be trained to visit households and record EPI-targeted children in a register, record their demographic movements,and assess their immunization status monthly for a year. The information recorded will be snapped and sent to the competenthealth center immunization team through WhatsApp. These will be used to plan and implement monthly community catch upimmunization sessions in collaboration with the community volunteer. In the control group, the routine immunization sessionswill be conducted with health centers organizing either weekly vaccination sessions for communities situated not farther than 5kilometers away from the health facility or monthly vaccination sessions in communities situated more than 5 kilometers awayfrom the health center. Baseline, mid-term and end-line surveys will be conducted to assess and compare immunization coverage,timeliness, and completeness.
Results:
Funded in 2018, data collection started in 2018 and has been completed. Data analysis and reporting are ongoing