Identifying Barriers and Sustainable Solution to Childhood Immunization in Khana Local Government Area of Rivers State, Nigeria

Abstract

The aim of this study was to uncover barriers to childhood immunization in order to make recommendations that will address the problem in Rivers State and Nigeria. A descriptive, cross-sectional study was carried out in September 2008, among mothers and caregivers of children aged 0-5 years, to examine the various barriers to childhood immunization in the Khana Local Government Area of the State. Data was analyzed using Epi Info version 6.4d software. A total of 1560 mothers and caregivers were interviewed. Their knowledge about immunization was low. Only 15.2% was able to define immunization and mention six vaccine preventable diseases. Most children (46.8%) did not complete their immunization schedule because of frequent shortage of vaccines in the health facilities. Long-term and advance commitment by the government to vaccine manufacturers to purchase vaccines and engaging communities in dialogue over benefits of immunization is advocated to improve immunization in the State.

Barriers to Childhood Immunization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review

“…Delivery at health facility enhances full immunization [18,20,22,27,28,40,48]. Long waiting time at health facilities was frequently and consistency noted [11,12,31,35,36,45]. Providers' hostility and rude attitudes to mothers were also a reported immunization barrier in this review [15, 16, 24, 30-33, 36, 45, 52, 53].…”

Barriers to Childhood Immunization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review

“…Forty-eight articles met all inclusion criteria for this study; 28 articles were excluded for various reasons. [See supplementary materials 3] Nine articles employed second-hand data analysis [7,12,18,27,37,40,41,47,42]; thirty-six used crosssectional design [1][2][3]11,[13][14][15][16][17]19,[21][22][23][24][25][26][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][38][39]42,[45][46][48][49][50][51]53,54] and three used case-control study [20,[43][44]. All described studies were conducted on Africa populations (103,655 adults and 76,327 children).…”

“…One critically examined barriers speci c to vaccination doses at birth 0 -1day [18] in the Gambia. Thirty articles reported national immunization coverage [1][2]7,[11][12][13][14][15][16][20][21][22][23][24][25][28][29]32,[34][35][38][39][40][43][44][45][46]49,50,[52][53][54], eighteen did not [3,[17][18][19]22,24,[26][27][30][31]33,[36][37][41][42]47,48,…”

“…8 studies examined allparental/caretakers, health systems and providers' barriers [3,11,13,16,43,45,48,52] [18,20]. Misconceptions about childhood immunization were recorded as major hindrance to effective utilization of immunization services in this review [1,2,[11][12][13][14][21][22]29,31,32,48,49] One article [17] reported that some parents believed that the immunity induced by vaccines is less effective than that of the natural disease, and they prefer to endure the diseases than immunization. Some caregivers were reported to believe in the e cacy of traditional medicines as an alternative to immunization and concomitant treatment by traditional healers [31,35].…”

“…Health workers were reported to covers long distances on outreach services due to inadequate health centers [11,13,15,43]. It was also reported that, caretakers covered long distances to reach immunization centers resulted to non-completion of vaccination series [2,3,13,18,[21][22][23][24][25][26]31,36,38,[40][41][42][43]46]. Some studies [11,13,18,26] attempted to analyze the associations of distance with immunization outcomes.…”