Punjab to digitalize polio missed children data

LAHORE: Punjab Emergency Operations Centre has announced that province will digitalize the data of missed children so that they are followed up and vaccinated in every campaign.
The remarks were made by the EOC Coordinator Mr Adeel Tasawwar who was presiding over a meeting held on Friday to review readiness of districts regarding the upcoming polio eradication campaign starting from October 28 all over the Punjab.
In mega districts like Lahore, Rawalpindi and Faisalabad, the campaign will continue for 7 days while in rest of the districts, the campaign will last five days.
More than 200,000 polio workers participate in the campaign, targeting 23 million children.
Chief Executive Officers of 36 District Health Administrations participated in the meeting via a video link.
During the meeting, the EOC coordinator was briefed on pre-campaign indicators including training monitoring status and union councils having large number of missed children. Mr Adeel was updated on the stratus of microplans as well as composition of government accountable members in polio teams.
Speaking to the participants, the EOC coordinator noted that in addition to one polio case, so far 47 polio environmental samples had tested positive in Punjab, raising the positivity ratio to 17 per cent.
“So this campaign will be really challenging as it will be very different from the last national campaign held in February”, the EOC head underscored.
He called upon districts to take on the challenge with enthusiasm and make the campaign successful.
Laying out challenges facing the province in polio eradication, the EOC coordinator underlined that Punjab was at the risk of virus importation due to high risk mobile population movement. Mr Tassawar highlighted the need to focus on mobile and migrant population by making sure that they are mapped, registered and vaccinated.
He directed districts to maintain liaison with police department to strengthen transit points, calling upon the health officials to make sure that polio teams deployed at transit sites stop every vehicle to vaccinate every child.
He also emphasized on districts to maintain authentic records of missed children, disclosing that the government was planning to digitalize the record of missed and persistently missed children.
On a question, he called upon districts to not overburden polio teams by increasing their scope of work in the last two campaign catchup days.
He called for following vaccine protocols and instructed the district officials to maintain a record of vaccine, including wastage and under-usage.
He underscored the need to ensure that cold chain of polio vaccine is maintained at every cost.
Districts lying on the inter-provincial boundaries updated the coordinator that they were organizing meetings with their counterparts in Balochistan, KP and Sindh to ensure that boundaries and areas are well demarcated.
The EOC coordinator disclosed that at the end of the campaign an evaluation will be done in all 36 districts based on missed children and data received on the last day of campaign.