Missed opportunities for immunization among children 0 to 11 months of age that were attended to at debre tabor comprehensive specialized hospital, south gondar zone, Ethiopia

Abstract

BackgroundThe World Health Organization's Expanded Immunization Program was established in 1974 and aimed to provide vaccines to children all over the world. Since the inception of this program, numerous initiatives and campaigns have been launched, and millions of children around the world have been saved from death. Many vaccine-preventable diseases, however, remain prevalent in developing countries. This is because most of those countries have low immunization coverage for an unknown number of reasons. As a result, the goal of this study was to examine missed opportunities for immunization among children aged 0 to 11 months.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was carried out from May to August 2022. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data, and the sample was chosen using a simple random sampling technique. Before being entered into the Epidata and exported to the Statistical Package for Social Science for analysis, the data were checked for consistency and completeness. The statistical significance was determined using binary and multiple logistic regression analyses. The statistical level of significance was established at p ≤ 0.05.ResultIn this study, 49.1% of immunization opportunities were missed. Education status [AOR = 2.45, 95% CI = 2.14, 4.22], rural residence [AOR = 4.32, 95% CI = 3.11, 6.38], and perception of caretakers [AOR = 2.13, 95% CI = 1.89, 4.07] were associated with the missed opportunity of immunization.ConclusionWhen compared to previous studies, the proportion of missed immunization opportunities was high in this study. The healthcare staff should be applying the multi-dose vial policy, which is recommended by the World Health Organization to increase the services. The doses for BCG and measles should be minimized to lower doses per vial in order to conduct immunization without having to wait for enough children and without worrying about vaccine waste. All infants who visit the hospital should be linked to immunization services.

Prevalence of missed opportunities of immunization among children below two years attending primary healthcare centers In Baghdad/Al-Karkh

“…However comparison of vaccination coverage rate between different countries are difficult due to differences in health services systems, vaccine series and immunization schedules. Our study shows that the dose-specific MOI was highest for MMR2 (46.9%) and Rota1 (34.5%) and lowest for pentavalent1 (0.27%) and OPV1 (0.54%) This finding is in contrast with other studies which revealed that MOI were more common for measles vaccine [14,18,27] , OPV3 vaccine followed by DPT3 vaccine [24] , compared to other vaccines, while Kassa et al [23] reported that major vaccines with a high MOI were BCG (37.9%), OPV0 (35%) and measles (31.1%). Our finding shows that children in Iraq are still at high risk of vaccine-preventable diseases especially outbreak of measles, mumps, rubella, and from the complications of measles, particularly malnutrition and pneumonia.…”

“…This difference in findings could be related to the ability of the caregivers to provide health care for their children due to their differences in age. Education level of parent is significantly associated with MOI, the higher percentage of incomplete immunization found among children of non-educated parents, this align with other studies [14,18,21,23] . One study conducted in Sudan [28] showed that there was no significant relationship between educational level and immunization status which is not consistent with our finding.…”

“…Compared to other regional countries UNICEF statistics report in 2015 shows the following results: Saudi Arabia (96%), Turkey (97.6%), Jordan and Iran (98%) and Syria (58%) [16] . Several reports from other countries revealed higher rates of MOI in comparison to our results; as that reported in Africa (47%) [22] , Ethiopia (49.1%) [23] , India (65.4%) [24] , and in Kenya (75%) [25] ; conversely, it was higher than that reported in China (12.6%) [26] , and South Africa (14.1%) [27] , and relatively similar to that reported in Sudan (35%) [28] and Pakistan (31.78%) [29] . These disparities in the MOI prevalence among the studies could be due to differences in MOI assessment methodologies regarding the study design, the study settings, the study population, study period differences, sample size, sampling techniques and low accessibility for healthcare facility infrastructure.…”

“…This finding may be attributed by the inadequate knowledge of the parents toward the national immunization schedules, and healthcare workers were more concerned to follow up the immunization status of infants rather than older children; Furthermore, there is a significant time gap between the administration of vaccines during the initial year of an individual's life and those given in the subsequent year [19,30] . Although the boys have a higher chance of being vaccinated in most of developing countries due to socio-cultural discrimination against the girls, in this study, there was insignificant association between gender and immunization completeness as in other previous studies from different countries [20][21][22][23][24]31]. However, it appears that there was no gender discrimination in immunization.…”

“…One study conducted in Sudan [28] showed that there was no significant relationship between educational level and immunization status which is not consistent with our finding. Our finding could be attributed to the fact that educated parents were more aware and knowledge about the benefits of immunization for their children [23] . A significant association was found between marital status and completeness immunization rate of children in this study, which is similar to other studies [19,20] .…”