BENGALURU: Working parents can now heave a sigh of relief. Knowing that their newborn child is protected from various life-threatening preventable diseases, gives them a sense of security. All thanks to a city-based doctor who is on a mission to not only heal but also immunise the country.
Explains Dr Ranjan Kumar Pejaver, Professor of Neonatology, Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS): “I was very distressed when working mothers used to come to me, depressed about missing their child's immunization dates. This issue of not being able to tackle the vaccinations on time, prompted me to develop a system to solve it.”
He is also the chairman of the Perinatal committee of the National Neonatology Forum of India, who is on a mission to increase the immunization coverage to more than 90% in the country.
Dr Ranjan, who is also the founder of the Immunize India Program, shares that as the baby starts growing, the dropout rate (where parents stop taking their child for vaccination) among parents start increasing.
“The coverage rate of BCG vaccination across any setting is 80%-83% but sadly, as time goes by, parents become less serious about immunization and then going back to the busy schedule makes them either delay the vaccinations or forget them completely. By the time the baby is due for its measles vaccination, at 9 months, the coverage rate drops by 15%. This decreasing coverage is all because of misplaced priorities which accounts for almost 30% of delayed vaccines across both rural and urban settings,” asserts Dr Pejaver.
He says that there are various reasons for missing out on the dates but the main one is forgetfulness and misplaced priorities. This program was conceived and built by group of three persons led by Dr Ranjan Kumar Pejaver of Bangalore, inspired by the predicament of a working housewife distressed because of forgetting to vaccinate her child. The other two founding members are: Janai Bharat and Gopalakrishna.
Speaking about the mobile service plan the doctor adds, “Research and well conducted studies and analysis have been done, which have stressed that reminders or alerts can improve the rate up to 20% of the missed vaccines. And, in India, with the mobile revolution going on, the best possible way is a national mobile phone-based sms alert service.”
How to register
“Any parent can register their child by sending an SMS with the child's pet name and date of birth to 566778 from their mobile phone. And for the next twelve years they would get three alerts or reminders (two before the due date in that week and one after the due date) which would make forgetting the day almost impossible,” explains Dr Ranjan.
He says that there have been almost 8,00,000 registrations already. “The whole purpose of vaccination is defeated if people forget the timely vaccinations. This is as dangerous as forgetting a vaccination. It is a completely evidence-based intervention,” sums up Dr Pejaver.
