Mumbai: Soon, every child’s routine immunisation schedules will be maintained digitally. An app or a web-based portal is likely to be started in a pilot manner next month and could be an amalgamation of two or three web programmes including Cowin, which was used successfully for the national Covid vaccination programme.
A civic doctor said that UNICEF officials have been working on the pilot project that will integrate Cowin as well as the RCH (reproductive and child health website) interface. “RCH was supposed to have a digital record of children’s vaccination, but it hasn’t been successful so far,” said Dr Arun Kumar Gaikwad of the BMC’s immunisation cell.
At a measles workshop organised in the city last week, UNICEF health specialist Dr Ashish Chauhan said the digitised platform should be available in January 2023. He spoke about how the paper/card records that are maintained at present are often lost by the parents after a few years. “It has been noted that the record is carefully maintained in the first year, but not thereafter,” he said.
The need for the digital record was felt during the ongoing measles outbreak in Mumbai when community health workers had to go from door to door in the hotspots to locate children who missed their measles shot due to the lockdown imposed during the initial days of the pandemic.
Roughly 20,000 children had missed their measles shots in the pandemic years, found the BMC. However, with digital records, a reminder could be sent to parents about impending vaccine shots for their children. The Cowin app sent reminders to people about their second dose and booster shots. Chief of the National Technical Advisory group of immunisation Dr NK Arora, has often mentioned that an upgraded version of the Cowin app would be used to track the vaccination status of children.
Meanwhile, there has been a shortage of mother and child health cards in Mumbai for the last 18 months. “These cards are sent to BMC by the state health department, but there has been no supply for the past several mo nths,” said a doctor. BMC’s community health workers have distributed xeroxed copies of the card to every mother who comes for vaccination.
