Access and Utilization of Immunization Services in Urban Slums of Aligarh

Immunization is one of the most cost-effective health investments, with proven strategies that make it accessible to even the most hard-to-reach and vulnerable populations. Though the immunization coverage in our country has increased to a large extent, still significant number of children residing in slums are incompletely immunized. Therefore the present study was conducted to assess the coverage of primary immunization in urban slums, and to assess the barriers of immunization if any. A coverage evaluation survey was done among children aged 12-23 months in urban slums of Aligarh by the resident doctors and interns of department of Community Medicine, JN Medical College, WHO-cluster survey methodology was used and 420 children were included in the study. The method used for the determination of the vaccination status was the vaccination card and the recall method. Data were collected, compiled and tabulated using SPSS 21.0 version. Out of 420 children only 25% of the children were fully immunized, 40.7% were not immunized and 34.3% partially immunized. The coverage for BCG was found to be 57.6% (CI= 50.92 to 64.28), the difference in coverage between BCG and Measles was 29.5 % (CI= 35.67 to 23.33), DPT-1 and Measles 19.3 % (CI=24.63-13.97) and between DPT-1 and DPT-3 was 17.6 % (CI= 22.75- 12.45). Lack of information was the major cause of children not getting the vaccine(s) as 71.5 % respondents were not fully aware of the programme. The present study shows that the status of complete immunization is depressingly  low in the study area. The area grieved from both accessibility and use of immunization services. The present study accentuates the imperious need for trivial interventions to tackle the issues of both dropout and non-assessibility, which are the main reasons of partial immunisation and unimmunization respectively.