Vaccine Management Knowledge and Practice of Health workers in Yemen

Abstract

Vaccine management comprises of estimation of vaccine needs, ordering, storage, distribution, monitoring vaccines use and limiting vaccine wastage. Yemen has been in conflict situation for over 7 years and remains one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with an estimated 23.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. This descriptive cross-sectional study to assess the vaccine management knowledge and practice in Yemen was carried out among health workers in 6 governorates. 536 health workers at different levels provided responses to the online questionnaire which were imported into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) platform for relevant descriptive and inferential analysis. Chi square test was used to determine statistical significance of observed difference in knowledge and vaccine management practice against relevant socio-demographic and work-related variables. The level of significance was set at p value <0.05. The study showed that 429(80%) had good knowledge while 63(11.8%) and 44(8.2%) had fair and poor knowledge of vaccine management respectively. More than two-thirds of respondents only receive vaccines 411(76.7%), 124(23.1%) receive and distribute vaccines. Vaccine distribution included use of refrigerated vehicles (15.2%), cold boxes (32.8%) and vaccine carrier (41.6%) both with conditioned ice packs. A total of 432(63.8%) have experienced vaccine stock-out and mostly for 1-2weeks (75.6%). Association between age and vaccine management knowledge was statistically significant with p-value of 0.006. The vaccine management knowledge and practice as shown from the findings of the study are commendable. However, there is need to address the artificial stock-out of vaccines to avoid missed opportunities. Keywords: Knowledge, Practice, Vaccine Management.