This year the eHA Sierra Leone team joined the national polio campaign as it kicked off throughout Freetown. The team visited the Murray Town community where the local Public Health Unit (PHU) was prepared to complete an extensive immunization hoping to reach all community children under the age of five.
This meant not only making home visits to families with trained nurse practitioners to provide medicine and document the process, but also touring schools as a strategic measure to reach as many children as possible. Our team witnessed health workers in communicate, organize, deliver and record their immunization activities within their communities using traditional pen and paper.
eHA already has a long and successful track record digitizing the aspects of Nigeria’s polio emergency response activities. Now, after the Sierra Leone event, the knowledge and exposure to these and similar types of immunization campaigns is spreading across the organization. As eHA continues to support routine immunization and rapid, real-time disease surveillance, our teams across West Africa will seek to increase their skills and expertise to design effective and user-friendly tools which mirror and simplify the work for health care workers. These efforts will contribute directly to a community’s ability to track its health status and make informed decisions to improve its overall wellbeing.