TRANSFORMATION THROUGH INNOVATION

Working in pairs, they move swiftly through the crowded train as it rumbles across the bustling suburbs of New Delhi. Starting from opposite ends, the men deftly hop from carriage to carriage, checking passengers along the way, until at some point in the middle they meet.

In this way they can carry out a complete sweep of the train within just a few short stops, sometimes with the help of a third colleague to concentrate solely on the packed Lady Carriages, which despite their name seem to contain as many men as women.

But while they may wear the uniform of railway security staff these teams of exclusively male inspectors are not here to check tickets or catch fare dodgers. Instead, as they board each carriage, it is the infants and children they seek, looking for a telltale mark of indelible purple ink on the fingernail of the left hand, and administering an oral dose of polio vaccine – two drops into the child’s mouth – whenever they fail to find one.

Out-of-the-box thinking

Vaccinating children on moving trains may seem a little excessive, but it is precisely this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that is changing the fate of India, enabling it to go nearly three years without a single case of wild poliovirus. Now Bihar, once regarded as a failing state, is applying the same innovative principles to other vaccines and getting stunning results.

In less than a decade, Bihar has gone from a point where just 18% of its children were receiving all three diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis shots – a rate way too low to have a significant impact on mortality – to a routine immunisation coverage today of more than 85%. What’s more this is having a curious, synergistic effect, which is helping to further improve polio coverage at the same time.

The biggest transformation has come not from trains – which wouldn’t be safe for routine immunisation anyway since most of the vaccines require injections – but through other innovative, more targeted approaches.

Microplanning, monitoring, mobilisation

By building on the national polio programme’s method of combining microplanning, monitoring, mobilisation and data analysis, state health officials, the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, have been able to create a huge and highly effective network that identifies problem areas or new disease trends in virtually real time.
Micro-planning enables a network of UNICEF-funded community “volunteers”, called Associated Social Health Activists (ASHAs), to keep track of who is in their community and which vaccines they have received, while implementing an immunisation plan tailored to the needs of each area, be it a village on the floodplains of the River Ganges or outreach to brick kiln workers.

Meanwhile, a separate team of monitoring staff carry out quality control and keep track of vaccine stocks, safe injection practices and the follow-up of children who missed doses.

Records for all this are kept meticulously up-to-date, which is then fed back upstream to government and WHO staff, who have the resources to analyse this huge amount of data. This in turn helps to improve management practices downstream by refining the quality of microplanning.

It is a virtuous vaccination circle -- one made even more effective through accountability at every single level of a system unafraid of self-analysis.

From microplans to macro improvements

In 2009, when staff compared polio microplans for Bihar with existing ones for routine immunisation, they discovered more than a quarter of the population was missing. In 2012, after a meticulous line-by-line comparison, staff added more than 50,000 transitional or high-risk people to routine immunisation microplans.
The turnaround has been remarkable. Not just because of Bihar’s huge population of 103 million people, with 2.8 million infants born every year, or its challenging landscape, with inaccessible mountainous regions in the north and flood plains to the south, but also because, like many Indian states, Bihar plays host to large numbers of hard-to-access migrant workers.

Hunk brick kiln

Some travel to Bihar from out-of-state, such as Budhani Kumari. Together with her two children, she spends seven months of the year working at the “Hunk” brick kiln, one of 93 in the Maner district, west of the state capital Patna. Each is a temporary home to around 200 people, nearly half of whom are children.

It’s backbreaking work, with each employee molding around 500 bricks a day. If it wasn’t for weekly onsite vaccination clinics, Budhani doubts she would find time to ensure her three children receive all their shots.

For Maya Devi and her two-and-a-half year old son Luvkush, it is more a question of access. Living in the village of Purani Panapur on a patchwork of water logged islands amidst the River Ganges, the only access is by rusty old pontoon bridges that buckle with the weight of passing vehicles. But when the rains come even these floating steel umbilicals are not long enough to reach dry land and then, she says, the only access is by boat.

How to catch moving targets

When it comes to immunisation, this combination of human migration and hard-to-reach settlements makes it difficult to prevent children slipping through the cracks. Vaccinating children on moving trains or running 24-hour drop-in vaccination clinics at stations are two examples of how to catch these moving targets.

Take Ishtiaq Ahmed, who rides a rickshaw in the Delhi suburb of Ghaziabad. His four-year-old daughter Alka received her polio vaccinations on a train during a trip to visit him with her mother and brother.

Immunisation through innovation

It is immunisation through innovation. The hope now is that if other states follow Bihar’s example, vaccination rates across India as a whole could rise too. Besides enabling the subcontinent to shed its reputation of being the nation with the largest number of unimmunised children in the world, if it can boost polio coverage too, then it might also help India finish the job and eradicate polio.

At a time when, with GAVI support, the government is preparing to launch the 5-in-1 pentavalent vaccine nationally, this is good news and a sign that India has turned a corner.

Dr Pavana Murthy