Daily Times

KARACHI: Parliamentarians and health experts have observed that Pakistan has increased its focus on increasing immunisation coverage and it hopes that with enhanced immunization coverage, Pakistan can reduce its health burden, and can especially improve children health. The initiatives like scorecards for Immunisation developed for parliamentarians can play its vital role, they said.

The International Vaccine Access Centre (IVAC) at Johns Hopkins University, with the support of GAVI, has developed scorecards for parliamentarians regarding routine immunisation. The tool is developed to address and identify gaps in reaching the target population, monitor the achievement of immunisation coverage and influence lawmakers to improved legislation.

“Scorecards are helpful to provide an overview of the current status of routine immunisation in Pakistan. Scorecards will assess vaccine coverage, equity, sustainability and financing,” explains Huma Khawar, a representative of IVAC, at Johns Hopkins University. “The tool is intended to be easy-to-use and straightforward to interpret, and its simplicity is built into original design so that in country participants do not inquire high administrative burden and the tool can be easily replicated,” she added.

According to Zehra Wadood Fatima, a member of National Assembly’s parliamentarians group on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), for improved legislation in child health sector, parliamentarians should be aware of shortcomings.

The availability of data provided in the scorecards would help in making the laws more effective.

“For example, until data was not available for polio especially in Balochistan and FATA, we were not able to work on polio effectively. Since the data is available, you see Pakistan has reduced the polio cases. Similarly, the data was not available recently there are 8,000 new cases every year of Thalaseamia. Since the data is available now, this National Assembly has passed a law which requires every person to get tested before their marriage,” she added.

Pakistan is observing ‘World Immunisation Week’ between April 24-30 this year. The aim is to highlight the collective action needed to ensure that every person is protected from vaccine-preventable diseases. This year’s theme: “Protected Together, #VaccinesWork”, encourages people at every level – from donors to the general public – to go further in their efforts to increase immunization coverage for the greater good.

In Pakistan, the Expanded Programme on Immunisation (EPI) was launched in the late 70’s. After 40 years, the programme covers 10 childhood diseases. Despite heaving funding, national immunization coverage according to the last PDHS was only 54% with Sindh and Balochistan the lowest.

According to Dr Jamal Raza, Pakistan Pediatric Association (PPA) Sindh president and the director of the National Institute of Child Health (NICH), it was a good omen that the government was focusing more on general immunisation. “Obviously the data provided by scorecards will help improve legislation on immunisation sector,” he said. “We can use polio teams’ expertise on routine immunisation on ground level to improve the situation,” Dr Jamal added.

Published in Daily Times, April 30^th 2018.