How to increase COVID-19 vaccination among a population with persistently suboptimal vaccine uptake? Evidence from the North Macedonia mobile vaccination and public health advice caravan.
Community-based intervention
Covid-19
Vaccination
Vaccine hesitancy
Journal
Health policy (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
ISSN: 1872-6054
Titre abrégé: Health Policy
Pays: Ireland
ID NLM: 8409431
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
12 Dec 2023
12 Dec 2023
Historique:
received:
20
06
2023
revised:
07
12
2023
accepted:
11
12
2023
medline:
16
12
2023
pubmed:
16
12
2023
entrez:
15
12
2023
Statut:
aheadofprint
Résumé
Over three years since the first COVID-19 vaccine was approved, many countries still have suboptimal vaccination rates despite holding great amounts of vaccines. Overall, there is little evidence on which policies are more effective to encourage vaccination, particularly in countries where a large share of the population remains unvaccinated. In this study, we examine the effectiveness of a community-based intervention carried out in March 2022 in North Macedonia, a country with a large and persistent share of the population that remains unvaccinated. The intervention, spearheaded by the Ministry of Health and supported by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, consisted of a mobile caravan offering vaccination and public health advice to different locations across the country on different days. Results from our staggered difference-in-difference model show that the mobile vaccination caravan increased daily vaccination rates by 7.7 vaccines per 100,000 inhabitants during the three weeks after the day of the caravan visit. This corresponds to a 35 % increase with respect to pre-intervention vaccination rates. We estimate a cost-effectiveness of 25.4 US dollars (USD) per additional vaccination induced. These results point to mobile caravan vaccines as an effective and cost-effective strategy to increase COVID-19 vaccination rates, even in a context of persistently suboptimal uptake.
Identifiants
pubmed: 38101148
pii: S0168-8510(23)00251-8
doi: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2023.104966
pii:
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Pagination
104966Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
Declaration of Competing Interest Authors declare no conflict of interest. The researchers have carried out the analysis independently of the funders of the intervention. WHO Europe only provided the data while it had no role on the design of the study, methodological choices, data analysis nor on the presentation and interpretation of the results.