Healthcare & Technologies

Biography

Biography: John Momoh

Abstract

Statement of the Problem: Health workers are required to visit every settlement location and vaccinate all eligible children during polio immunization campaigns. Several factors pose challenges to reaching every settlement are missed during immunization campaigns, especially in Borno Nigeria. Some of these are: (1) Settlements lists at the state do not correlate to those at the local government areas (LGA); (2) Settlements missed were reported at the end of the campaign with visits planned for a mop-up day; (3) The security situation in Borno is volatile, this sometimes leads to changes in the daily implementation plan (DIP) at the LGA, which leaves a large number of settlements missed at the end of the campaigns.

Methodology: As part of the development of a solution to optimize planning, tracking and reporting of health interventions activities, we developed a tool to support dynamic planning, enabling changes in DIPs at LGA due to fluctuating security situations and logistics challenges to be incorporated into the daily monitoring of settlement visits. Finally, the tool enabled analysis of visitation results, visual presentation and automated generation of visitation maps to support daily reviews and decision making by government and health workers.

Findings: This tool analyzes and compares GPS coordinates from mobile devices carried by vaccination teams against those of settlements on the DIP to generate a map and list of settlements visited or missed on a daily basis. Field consultants at the LGAs review meetings, which aid the teams to plan visits to missed settlements on subsequent days prior to the final mop up day.

Conclusion & Significance: Proportion of settlements missed after a campaign has significantly reduced from 22% to 1% and proportion of missed settlements resolved before the end of campaign increased from 8% to 49% in November 2017 and March 2019 respectively.