Breaking Barriers: How Digital Health Technology Can Improve Childhood Immunisation Rates
Empowering mothers, caregivers and healthcare providers with digital health technology to ensure every child has access to essential immunisation services.
World Immunisation Week is an important time to highlight the importance of childhood immunisation. However, it is also important to recognise the various limitations faced in enabling child immunisation.
Barriers to child immunisation
Mothers and caregivers face several barriers that prevent their children from getting immunised, including a lack of knowledge about immunisation, distance to access points, financial deprivation, lack of partner support, and distrust in vaccines and immunisation programs. Other associated factors for low vaccine rates include the number of offspring, lifestyle, migration, occupation, parent’s forgetfulness, inconvenient time, and language barriers. Furthermore, factors such as the child’s gender beliefs and social-cultural aspects impede getting children vaccinated.
At a macro level, mothers and caregivers also experience barriers at the health system level, including limited human resources and inadequate infrastructures to maintain the cold chain and adequate supply of vaccines. These barriers result in overburdened clinics where citizens are turned away without help. Additionally, bad treatment by healthcare workers can result in mothers and caregivers devaluing the service.
Various socio-demographic and obstetric factors influence the uptake of childhood immunisation. Socio-demographic factors such as maternal age, maternal and paternal educational status, mother’s marital status, maternal occupation, family income, wealth index and ethnicity have been identified as significant factors affecting immunisation uptake. Additionally, obstetric factors such as antenatal and postnatal care follow-up, preceding birth interval, and place of delivery also play a crucial role in determining childhood immunisation uptake.
Parents’ education, poverty, maternal access to media, urban location, high illiteracy, and a country with high fertility are all factors that contribute to low vaccine rates. These factors can make access to proper healthcare, including immunisation, challenging for some families.
Teen moms face unique experiences when it comes to child immunisation. Adolescent pregnancy is often stigmatised, which can lead to young pregnant people feeling ashamed and not seeking the care they require. Such beliefs and attitudes must be challenged at a community and national level.
It is crucial to provide teen moms with support and resources to ensure they can access their children's childhood immunisation. Healthcare providers should take the time to educate teen moms on the importance of immunisation and address any concerns or fears they may have. Additionally, community-based programmes can help provide teen moms with the support they need to navigate the healthcare system and access immunisation services. By addressing the unique experiences of teen moms and challenging the stigma surrounding adolescent pregnancy, we can help ensure that all children have access to essential health services like childhood immunisation.
Empowerment through digital health
Digital health interventions have shown promise in increasing vaccine uptake by improving access to information and resources. By providing educational materials and reminders, digital health interventions can empower parents to make informed decisions about their child’s health and stay on top of immunisation schedules. This can help bridge the gap for families facing barriers to accessing traditional healthcare services.
Every child deserves the opportunity to grow up healthy and protected from vaccine-preventable diseases, and it is our responsibility to ensure that this becomes a reality for all. Digital health technology can be used to support health workers in overcoming the barriers they face in fulfilling child immunisation mandates. For example, digital tools can help healthcare providers track immunisation rates and identify populations with low vaccine uptake. This information can be used to target interventions and resources for these populations, ensuring that children receive the vaccines they need.
Moreover, digital health technology can help healthcare providers to overcome distance barriers and reach remote populations. Telemedicine can provide virtual consultations, and educational programmes can be delivered through mobile phones, helping to improve knowledge and attitudes towards immunisation. Equipping healthcare workers with these tools can help them provide better care, even in challenging circumstances, and ensure that every child has access to the essential immunisation services they need.
Childhood immunisation is crucial for the health and well-being of children. Understanding and addressing these barriers can improve immunisation rates and ensure that all children are protected against vaccine-preventable diseases. Digital health plays a significant role in addressing the low uptake of childhood immunisation by enhancing knowledge and understanding of vaccines, increasing access to healthcare services, and helping healthcare providers to identify populations with low vaccine uptake. By harnessing the power of technology, we can help ensure that all children have access to essential health services like childhood immunisation.
Sources for the article include:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0037905
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-11954-8
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8320032/#:~:text=These%20factors%20are%20socio%2Ddemographic,postnatal%20care%20follow%2Dup%2C%20preceding
