Nowadays, public health interventions remain the driving force in promoting population health, especially in developing countries where communicable diseases still present a very worrying frequency. Despite the establishment of structured outreach teams, follow-up and monitoring are essential activities to ensure correction and catalyze effective delivery of immunization services. During this study, we conducted regular monitoring of AVM vaccination and motivated community health workers on sensitization, rumor management, and minimizing resistance to AVM vaccination in order to improve the AVM coverage rate and increase measles case reporting.
Methods: A Quasi-Experimental Study and action research, led in the Karisimbi as an experimental Zone and Goma Health zone as a control Zone. Supervision of Community Health Workers was done by the team consisting of researchers at the health areas and the district-level health staff conducted supportive supervision of community health workers. During these supervisory visits, the team ensured knowledge of signal definitions and checked that community health workers correctly identified the measles cases, and the unvaccinated children and managed messages correctly. A structured interview was conducted for data collection and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were organized in the health areas for qualitative data to collect the opinions of community health workers on non-participation in measles social mobilization activities. A questionnaire grid and a focused discussion guide were used as data collection tools. The data collection was done in Kobo collection while the analysis and processing were SPSS 18 software. To estimate the degree of significance between the effectiveness of community health workers' training and the AVM vaccine administration, the study used the Odds Ratio test at a Confidence interval of 5%.
Findings: The frequency of cases increased progressively over the months following the different techniques used for intervention. More than 4346 CHILDREN cases were vaccinated in routine activities and 4346 unvaccinated children at the VAR were recovered and 152 measles cases were identified. Resistance and rumors were circumvented by using model lessons from the presidents of the community relays through vaccination of relatives.
Conclusion: The results showed that monitoring and follow-up had an important influence on the motivation of workers.
The involvement of health workers is an approach that has contributed greatly to the promotion of the health status of populations, especially in low-income countries. However, this involvement would only be effective if these health workers are adequately trained, regularly monitored and supervised, and linked to health facilities to allow for rapid referral of identified problems in the community. This study is conducted to ensure that health workers are trained to provide better services during vaccination action of children against measles. This is a quasi-experimental study conducted in two urban health zones in the city of Goma. The study population was made up of health workers occasionally taken in the health areas of these two zones. Data were collected and processed using SPSS and Excel. Logistic regression and odd-ratio tests were performed to determine the effect of training the health workers on the vaccination of children against measles. During the intervention, 35 children per month were covered. Routine AVM vaccination estimated at 2065 children before the interventions rose to 5463 AVM vaccinated with an estimated coverage of 80.7% after the interventions, while the health centers notified a total of 128 cases. The training of Community Health Works on social mobilization for vaccination appears to be an important tool in the promotion of the vaccination system. It reminds the mother and allows for recovery of dropout’s loss lost to follow-up, especially for the latest vaccines such as the AVM.