Title: Introduction
Course: Immunization - Ethiopia (Full)

In this study session you will learn about how to monitor your own immunization programme. Monitoring is the routine ongoing collection of data and the assessment of activities, in order to enable the targets you agreed in your action plan to be compared with what you have actually achieved. Monitoring an immunization programme includes the proper use of EPI recording tools to collect reliable data, which can be evaluated to improve the planning and management of the immunization service in the future. So, in this study session, we will teach you about the main recording tools used to collect and report the data from your immunization programme, so you can monitor and evaluate your performance.

The aim of this study session is to teach you how to improve your immunization service by identifying problems and their causes, developing solutions, and incorporating these solutions as activities in your work plan. Your overall goal is to increase immunization coverage rates and reduce dropout, so that babies like the one pictured in Figure 10.1 can be protected from all the vaccine-preventable diseases covered by the EPI.

Figure 10.1  Immunization protects thousands of Ethiopian babies every year. (Photo: Sacca, accessed from Wikimedia Commons)