Polio Vaccination: eHealth Africa, NPHCDA Introduce Digital Innovation To Boost Planning

A non-governmental organisation, eHealth Africa, in partnership with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA), has piloted a new digital innovation named Planfeld to ensure accurate and effective planning of polio vaccination and other routine immunisation activities in Nigeria.

Kicking off the pilot workshop in Kaduna State, the eHealth Africa team led by programme manager Abubakar Shehu demonstrated the innovation to primary healthcare workers and stakeholders, showing how the Plainfield application can be used to develop accurate micro plans and monitor vaccination activities.

Speaking with newsmen during the workshop, Abubakar Shehu said, “Planfeld application will help develop a micro plan which enables us to know the number of settlements that we are targeting, the number of children in those settlements and what quantity of vaccine we need to plan for that activity”.

He said, “Previously, developing a micro plan manually, especially for polio vaccination activities, usually took at least four days, but with the digitization of micro plans using technology, it will take only less than 30 minutes.”

According to him, the digitization of micro-planning for vaccination activities will ensure that more settlements are reached with public health interventions. He said, “For immunization to achieve the desired objective, it needs to reach at least 80% of the target population. Thus, we decided to develop such an application using technology that can accurately derive a microplan within a very short time.”

The pilot workshop according to him will be conducted in Kaduna, Niger, Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara states. While appreciating the National and State Primary Healthcare Development Agency (N/SPHCDA), he said the orgnisation looks forward to comments and feedback on how to further optimize the Planfeld solution to revolutionise the planning and execution of vaccination efforts.

Also speaking during the workshop, the Kaduna State team leader of the Polio Outbreak Project for SOLINA, Mr Victor Obagunlu Adeleke, from SOLINA Center for International Development and Research, said the micro plan digitization will save time while ensuring proper resource allocation. He said, “Primarily, the fact that there’s going to be a great reduction in time and energy spent in developing micro-plan and considering also the fact that it is not a capital intensive project, makes it easier,”

“When you look at the micro-plan development process currently, starting from the settlement down to the ward, to the LGA, to the state, it takes a lot of time to aggregate data from all of these levels”, he said.

On his own part, the incident manager Polio Emergency Operations Center, EOC, Kaduna State Primary Health Care Development Agency (SPHCDA), Dr Abdullahi Musa Garba, said the digitisation process promotes accuracy and improvement in terms of polio immunisation and other related diseases while also minimising errors compared to manual process conducted in previous activities.

“Currently conventional planning or the system for micro-plans is really not an easy process. “So by the time we deploy the use of this digitized micro plan, it will make the work easier for the technical people and the teams that are doing the immunization”, he added.