Vaccination Coverage - Analysis and evidence synthesis to inform the development of field assessments of vaccination coverage

Vaccination services are essential to protect individuals, through their entire life, from disease and premature mortality. Vaccination services are facing increasing challenges, such as the increasing complexity of services deploying new or unused vaccines, the logistics of the cold chain to keep them or the vaccination hesitancy among certain communities. Vaccination coverage data is crucial to support countries' managers and policy makers, as well as the international community, in their decision-making efforts to increase the availability, access and coverage of vaccination services. Data has to be of adequate quality to inform decisions are local, national and international level. Often, administrative estimates may be biased due to lack of reliable denominators, incompleteness of data and heterogenous reporting. Hence, national representative vaccination surveys may be needed to provide a complementary or even a main source of vaccination coverage data.

The World Health Organization has developed the Vaccination Coverage Cluster Surveys Reference Manual (2018), to provide methodological support to researchers, implementers and users of surveys data. The Manual is meant to be updated in order to incorporate recent developments and additional methods and to improve its usability. Swiss TPH has been given the mandate to assess the past use of the manual in order to inform the update editorial process.

The objective of this project is to review the evidence on the use of the Manual (i) in the literature reporting national vaccination coverage surveys and (ii) among Manual users or potential users.

We will use a mix of literature review methods and questionnaires distributed to vaccination stakeholders in the wide network of WHO vaccination partners and collaborators.