Goal
All people benefit from recommended immunizations throughout the life-course, effectively integrated with other essential health services.
Objectives:
Strengthen immunization policies and service delivery throughout the life-course, including for appropriate catch-up vaccinations and booster doses.
Establish integrated delivery points of contact between immunization and other public health interventions for different target age groups.
Key areas of focus:
Mobilizing support: Raise awareness of the benefits of vaccination beyond early childhood, through adolescence and in priority adult groups such as pregnant women, health workers and older adults.
Evidence-based delivery practices: Identify and evaluate new delivery strategies for increasing coverage of recommended vaccines throughout the life-course.
Missed opportunities: Implement proven approaches to reduce the number of missed opportunities by integrating immunization into other primary health care planning, health registers and other record-keeping systems, and streamline use of all encounters with the health system to verify and provide missed vaccines and other essential health interventions.
Cross-sector collaboration: Form collaborations to integrate age-appropriate and catch-up vaccination into public and private health services, emphasizing the reciprocal benefits of receiving vaccines with other health interventions. Establish collaboration beyond the health care sector to ensure integration of immunization into context specific programmes such as for education, nutrition, water and sanitation, care of older people and women’s empowerment.
Policy environment: Promote changes in legislation or in the policy of immunization and other programmes to extend the national focus beyond early childhood immunization. Form new collaborations and private-sector partnerships to mobilize financing for vaccination of older age groups.
Tracking vaccination status: Institute policies for monitoring vaccination coverage at different ages and facilitating administration of vaccines throughout the life-course. Vaccine development: Generate evidence on the disease burden among older age groups, the potential of vaccines to decrease it and the programmatic implications for introducing the vaccines.
Application of the core principles:
People-centred. Vaccination throughout the life-course is integrated into other health care services for different age groups, according to the needs of individuals.
Country-owned. National immunization technical advisory groups will guide country programmes in extending vaccination beyond infancy throughout the life-course to reflect specific national and subnational contexts.
Partnership-based. Partnerships with other health programmes and with non-health actors (including in education, water, sanitation and hygiene and nutrition) are built into comprehensive life-course approaches for disease control and elimination, including for pneumococcus pneumonia, diarrhoea and cervical cancer.
Data-guided. Implementation and social and behavioural research will be conducted to generate evidence for effective delivery of integrated, coordinated packages of vaccination services and to identify new contact points for vaccination throughout the life course. Research will identify the vaccines required for older age groups.