Provincial Intra-Action Review of the COVID-19 Vaccination Programme: Opportunities to Improve Vaccine Response in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Background

Low levels of COVID-19 vaccination coverage in many countries prompted the use of rapid assessments to characterize barriers to vaccination and identify corrective measures. The World Health Organization recommended the use of intra-action reviews (IARs) to identify best practices, gaps, and lessons learned to make real-time improvements to the COVID-19 vaccination response.

Objective

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) implemented a national IAR in July 2021 that was poorly attended by the provincial health level, where vaccination activities are planned and implemented. To bridge this gap, we proposed sub-national IARs focused on COVID-19 vaccine program implementation at the provincial level.

Methods

Using the WHO methodology, we organized a four-day provincial IAR workshop and invited national, provincial and health zone Ministry of Health (MoH) representatives and private and non-governmental organizations involved in the provincial COVID-19 vaccination response. Participants were divided into six groups based on their expertise, affiliation, and role within the health system to assess and identify lessons learned, challenges and the solutions within each of the six technical areas: (1) coordination, planning and monitoring; (2) service delivery; (3) risk communication and community engagement; (4) adverse effects following immunization (AEFI); (5) logistics; (6) and data management, monitoring and evaluation.

Results

The first provincial COVID-19 IAR was conducted in Goma, North Kivu, from January 19-22, 2022. A total of 56 participants came from provincial and health zone offices, and non-governmental organizations. Through work group discussions, they identified best practices, challenges, and lessons learned, and made recommendations to improve implementation of vaccination activities and reach coverage targets. Activities were proposed to operationalize recommendations and address challenges to improve the provincial response.

Conclusion

This provincial IAR was a useful tool for reviewing progress and areas of improvement, while evaluating aspects of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. It provided a means to share information with vaccination partners on areas of intervention, tailored to the local context.

Informations de copyright

© 2024 Kabamba Nzaji et al.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or RTI. Mrs Kristen Stolka reports grants from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, during the conduct of the study; Dr Pia MacDonald reports grants from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and was an employee for RTI during the conduct of the study; current employee for Pfizer, outside the submitted work. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.