The two-day dry run to test preparedness for the rollout of the COVID19 vaccination in four states, including Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat concluded on Tuesday.
The Union Health Ministry conducted a two-day dry run on December 28-29.
Backed with the experience of rolling out the Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) and nationwide multiple wide-range vaccination campaigns such as measles-rubella (MR) and Japanese Encephalitis (JE) campaign, required steps are being undertaken to vaccinate priority population groups.
The priority population groups include health care workers, frontline workers and people above 50 years for Covid19 vaccination.
Also read: India begins dry run of vaccination in Assam, 3 other states before mass rollout of Covid19 vaccine
The dry run exercise was aimed at end-to-end testing of COVID19 vaccination process and included planning and preparations as per the operational guidelines; creation of facilities and users on Co-WIN application, session site creation and mapping of sites.
Health Care Workers (HCW) data upload, receipt of vaccines and vaccine allocation by the district, session planning, deployment of vaccination team, logistics mobilization at session site, mock drill of conducting vaccination and reporting and review meetings at block, districts and state level also included in the dry run exercise.
The objective of dry the run was also to undertake and confirm field implementation of IT platform Co-WIN and guide way forward prior to actual implementation.
District collector with engagement of district and block task force were made responsible for conducting the dry run and it was expected to provide insights on any gaps or bottlenecks during actual conduct of vaccination.
The two-day end-to-end dry run was undertaken in Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh, Rajkot and Gandhinagar in Gujarat, Ludhiana and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar (Nawanshahr) in Punjab and Sonitpur and Nalbari districts in Assam.
Specific teams were formed for various tasks by the district administration and activities like uploading of dummy beneficiary’s data, session site creation, vaccine allocation, communication vaccination details to vaccinators& beneficiaries, beneficiary mobilization were carried out.
Field feedback on the first day of dun run was also reviewed on December 29 through Video conferencing with state and district programme officers by joint secretary (public health).
A government statement said all states expressed satisfaction in terms of the operational approach and use of IT platform to ensure transparency and effective monitoring of vaccination processes expected to cover a large number of people across the country.
Additional suggestions on IT platform were also noted for further enhancement of Co-WIN platform.
Detailed insights and feedback so obtained will help enrich the operational guidelines and IT platform and will strengthen the COVID19 vaccination roll out plan.