Studying Vaccination Coverage and Design of Short Message Service Based Reminder to Improve Children Vaccination Coverage in Hawassa; Sidama Region; Ethiopia

Abstract A vaccine is a kind of remedy that trains the body’s protection system so that it can combat infection. The national routine immunization coverage in Ethiopia is low. Among the main reason for defaulting children’s vaccinations are disremembering the appointment date, communication gap between service providers and the community, knowhow about vaccination and etc. This work is to investigate vaccination coverage in Hawassa city and the main reasons for vaccination dropout, and then provide a solution for that main reason. Data was collected from 360 children whose age is between 1 to 2 years who live in Hawassa city. The data analysis result showed that only 51% of the children are fully vaccinated; the main reason for vaccination dropout which weighs 57% was found to be disremembering the appointment date. Providing a solution to not only one of the main reasons but also for the one which weighs the most in the city of this study will improve the vaccination coverage. As the main reason is found to be disremembering the vaccination appointment date, this work provides a Short Message Service (SMS) based automatic reminding system. The design part uses a database, OzekiNG network gateway, and global system for mobile communication modem with an active subscriber identity module. In this system, the health extension workers will register the clients’ detailed information including appointment dates during the birth of a baby that will be accessed periodically by the OzekiNG to send the reminder SMS to the mothers one day ahead of the day of vaccination. After the automatic reminding mechanism was developed and implemented, coverage of fully vaccinated children increased from 51–71% and the problem of forgetting appointment dates decreases from 57–14%. The efficiency of the developed system is found to be 85%. From the above-mentioned results and the currently available communication mechanisms, it can be concluded that the reminding system can be simply implemented to improve child vaccination coverage by bridging the gap due to disremembering the vaccination appointment date.