Community involvement among key factors to expand EPI goals

May 12, 2017 News

Increased sensitization and training for teachers and parents, too, are among the deliberate tactic being embraced by the Ministry of Public Health in its quest to advance its Expanded Programme on Immunization [EPI].
The Ministry is gearing to advance its immunization efforts by utilizing the Multi-Year Plan 2017-2021, which provides funding to further vaccination outreach activities in the Americas.
The Multi-Year Plan is one that was recently emphasized by Minister within the Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Karen Cummings, as a key means of advancing Guyana’s EPI goals.
While health workers are among the key targets of the sensitization to make more efficient the work of the Ministry, based on the Plan, it is required that members of the community also play an instrumental role.
The Plan outlines the need for sensitization efforts, taking the form of sessions held at schools for Parent Teacher Associations and teachers and to the community at large.
“These sessions would take the form of a delivery of a standardized set of messages, produced by health education specialists and delivered by knowledgeable health staff from the area,” the Plan details. It is expected that the Ministry will seek to have several such sessions at schools or at any forum that would be conducive to training.
As part of a nationwide programme, the Ministry, according to Minister Cummings, is poised for a much more aggressive set of marketing initiatives for its immunization drive.
This will therefore entail the Plan being endorsed by prominent persons such as the President and the First Lady, well known sports personalities or singing sensations, or religious personalities, all of whom could relay the need for vaccine and the positive actions of disease prevention.
In addition to having the stories of survivors and/or victims of cervical cancer for instance being shared, the Plan is one that encourages sensitization about immunization at public events such as fairs, cricket matches or other mass gatherings.
Taking advantage of social media has also been recognized as an important means of raising immunization awareness. According to the Plan, “This is a powerful tool and can be very useful in identifying out of school girls and to encourage girls to have the vaccine.”
Among the primary focuses of the immunization drive, particularly as it relates to young girls, is that of vaccination to protect them against the Human papillomavirus (HPV).
The introduction of the vaccine was intended to help curb the prevalence of cervical cancer, since based on information from the Ministry of Public Health, Guyana has the third highest rate of cervical cancer in the Western hemisphere.
The HPV vaccination drive, which commenced a few years ago, has been fraught with some setbacks. Among those who have confirmed this development has been senior nurse within the Ministry, Linda Johnson. Among the setbacks she recalled was that “a lot of people were going on the internet and finding all kinds of information, some of which were not doing us any good. We had a lot of roadblocks when we started and we didn’t have much vaccines administered.”
Among the misconceptions linked to the HPV vaccine is that girls who would have been administered the vaccine become sterile, or it could cause their menstrual cycle to come too early.
Consequently, the available vaccines declined, with a previous Minister of Health advising that health workers only complete doses with girls that had received an initial dose. In order for a girl to be protected against cervical cancer during adulthood she would have had to have been administered three doses of the vaccine, within a specified timeframe. The local health sector is currently vaccinating girls between the ages of nine and 13.
However with the ongoing sensitisation with the support of those within the community, the shortcomings associated with the immunisation drive will become a thing of the past and thus help to expand the EPI goals of the Ministry.
To date, the Public Health Ministry’s vaccination programme has introduced 17 antigens, including HPV, for the protection of the population against vaccine preventable diseases. The national coverage currently stands at over 90 percent for all antigens under one year. Added to this, the immunisation programme has expanded from a child immunisation programme to a family immunisation programme.

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Community involvement among key factors to expand EPI goals

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