Improving Childhood Vaccination Coverage

Following the re-opening of borders after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vanuatu National Health Emergency Operations Centre (NHEOC) and Ministry of Health (MoH) requested that HELPR-1’s mission be expanded from its original COVID-19 vaccination to support the restoration of health services impacted by the pandemic. This involved resupplying remote clinics using stock from the National medical warehouse, specialist outreach teams, and supporting clinical care.

Additional challenges included:

• Malaria outbreaks had been escalating, with previous gains toward malaria eradication lost during the pandemic due to a lack of access to the outer islands, and a focus on COVID-19 prevention.
• Childhood vaccination rates had fallen during the pandemic due to the same lack of access, lack of funding, and inoperable cold-chain systems. A catch-up childhood immunisation campaign was launched to combat vaccine-preventable illnesses.
• Measles in particular was a risk and a campaign was launched to vaccinate children ages 1-5 years with a second dose as borders reopened.

HELPR-1 was therefore tasked by the MoH to urgently support these critical objectives in addition to assisting other program delivery partners in the areas of climate change, biosecurity, and widening healthcare access more generally.

To date over 26,000 vaccines have been delivered to over 23,300 children at immunisations clinics across 630 remote and hard-to-reach villages in every province of Vanuatu.