Durban - The KwaZulu-Natal provincial Department of Health with technical support from WHO South Africa organized the COVID-19 vaccination intra action review (IAR).

As a country-led facilitated discussion, an IAR provides an opportunity to review the functional capacity of the public health and emergency response systems at the national and subnational levels and to identify practical areas that need immediate remediation or can be targeted for sustained improvement of the outbreak response.

Held in Durban city of KwaZulu-Natal province, the IAR exercise involved over 200 health workers and health administrators from the 11 districts of the province. The diverse audience with various experience contributed to maximizing the value of the IAR for promoting productive discussion and developing appropriate recommendations.

The three-day intensive discussions are part of a series of exercises planned in different provinces of South Africa in the coming weeks to take stock of the ongoing COVID-19 response efforts with particular focus on vaccination roll-out. The province of KwaZulu-Natal held its first IAR in 2020 to assess and enhance its works and plans while dealing with the pandemic.

In his opening remarks, Dr Sandile Tshabalala, the Head of KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health noted that the IAR is important to assess the provincial operational capacity of the system to further improve the vaccination while responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As of 15 March 2022, KwaZulu-Natal province has fully vaccinated 36.9% of its adult population that was the lowest in the country. The province is determined to ramp up its vaccination rate as doses become available.

WHO’s South Africa Incident Manager, Dr. Julius Wekesa appreciated the collaboration between WHO and health partners at the national and sub-national levels. The WHO will continue to provide necessary and timely technical support to South Africa in curbing the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. WHO has worked with the national and provincial health authorities from the preparedness phase into response mode. “As cases and death continue to decline, it is time to look back and review the response highlighting good practices, lessons learnt, challenges and provide recommendations to address them.  We look forward to the recommendations from the meeting and the action plan to address them” said Dr Wekesa.

Throughout the three days of the IAR, the participatory exercise with highly interactive working sessions closely reviewed and reflected on the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination programme, as part of the COVID-19 outbreak response, to identify current best practices and lessons learned. The participants also worked on identifying gaps and bottlenecks inhibiting the successful implementation of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the province. There were proposed corrective measures and actions to improve existing capacity and districts’ response in scaling up vaccination. The discussions along with the best practices, areas of improvements, and the way forward were documented in the IAR report and will informed the COVID-19 provincial and district vaccination plan for KwaZulu-Natal.  

In addition, the IAR provided an opportunity to look at the fourth wave of COVID-19  as well as the resetting of the health systems with focus on KwaZulu-Natal province. The highlight of the fourth wave helped to reflect back and understand the factors that drove the surge in COVID-19 cases and fatalities in the province and the successful elements of the response that led by the provincial and district health partners. The session on resetting of the health systems identified areas and approaches to optimize the pandemic response without neglecting the health system resilience and integration of the COVID-19 preparedness and response into a broader health systems by enabling recovery of the health systems and building back better.   

The outputs of the IAR will help to update the provincial COVID-19 vaccination plan that is being implemented by the government health partners in the province and across the districts. Ultimately, the IAR, although focused on vaccination, will contribute to and strengthen the overall pandemic preparedness and response capabilities and the resilience of the health systems.