Bắc giang
On-demand vaccination service providers must ensure strict process and vaccine quality
24 on-demand vaccination service providers
Being more aware of health care, people are increasingly going to on-demand vaccination establishments because they offer more types of vaccines against infectious diseases than the National Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI). The most convenient is that people can inject at on-demand vaccination facilities in the province.
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Examining vaccines at the Viet Yen district Health Center. |
Currently, 10 districts and city in the province have on-demand vaccination establishments. Some places have many sites such as Bac Giang city, Hiep Hoa district and Luc Nam district (each with four sites).
The Safpo Clinic (the provincial Center for Disease Control) is always the busiest place in the province, open all weekdays. About 300 people come here every day for vaccination, mostly children who are injected vaccines excluded in the EPI.
By December 2019, the whole province had 24 establishments declared eligible for providing on-demand vaccination service, including 11 public health facilities and 13 non-public ones. The units have entered customer information into the national immunization software system.
Rectifying violating units
To date, nearly 30 infectious diseases have prophylactic vaccines. However, only 12 types of vaccines have been included in the free EPI. For the remaining diseases, people have to use on-demand vaccination service.
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In the previous years, the proportion of children of vaccinated age using on-demand vaccines accounted for only about 5 percent, but now the rate has increased to 20-25 percent. Many adults also register for on-demand vaccination to prevent some contagious diseases. Since the beginning of the year, on-demand vaccination service providers in the province have delivered more than 47,000 injections. |
However, due to the increasing demand, on-demand vaccination establishments often lack vaccines. This fact leads to many of them increasing service prices with inconsistencies in prices between injections.
During the post-inspection process, the provincial Department of Health found that up to now, only 10 out of 25 vaccination establishments in the province have vaccine stores meeting Good Storage Practice (GSP) standard. Most vaccination establishments do not have separate vaccine storage areas but still keep vaccines together with other drugs. In some places, there are not enough human resources to practice a safe vaccination process.
The department has requested and set a time for vaccination establishments to fix their shortcomings and rearrange areas for vaccine storage according to regulations. If any establishments still intentionally violate regulations, the agency will suspend their operations. Through inspection, by December 3, the facilities had strictly complied with the operation regulations.
In the coming time, the Department of Health will continue to inspect the use of on-demand vaccines and medical bio-products in the province while requiring establishments to regularly review infrastructure facilities and evaluate the cold chain system to develop plans to upgrade and repair vaccine storage areas up to GSP standard.
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Providing on-demand vaccine injections for for children at the provincial Center for Disease Control. |
The health sector will focus on controlling the quality of service delivery in establishments, not allowing medical workers to practice vaccine injection illegally. It will ask the units to list the vaccine prices and publicize the phone numbers for people to give feedback.
At the same time, people are told that on-demand vaccines and vaccines in the National Expanded Programme on Immunization are strictly quality-tested. People should take vaccination under the EPI and only get on-demand vaccination for vaccines not included in the programme to ensure effective prevention of diseases.
Minh Minh
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