Talking books to improve vaccine knowledge

Using Mavis talking books to improve rural community health education on immunization and primary health care services.

Immunization is one of the most cost effective measures to prevent death of children under 5 years old. However, the lack of understanding/knowledge of the benefits of immunization is one of the biggest barriers to uptake of Immunization in Nigeria. 

Health service providers in primary care centers across the country are required to give an immunization “health talks” before every vaccination session to ensure mothers understand the value and schedules of vaccines to be administered. However these health talks do not always occur and sometimes are not as extensive as they should be owing either to inadequately staffed centers or skills.

Our solution is to preprogramme Mavis talking books with standardised immunization health talk in the local language which we will provide to health workers in rural communities to ensure caregivers are provided all the necessary information concerning immunization. We hope that this address gaps in human resource for health and provide caregivers in rural communities a better understanding of the importance of vaccination to increase the uptake of vaccines. Increasing the uptake will contribute to improving immunization coverage and reducing the burden of vaccine preventable diseases and death.

Our solution uses existing technology in a new way. To our knowledge this solution has never been tried and has the potential to reduce or eradicate errors and misinformation about immunization in rural communities.

We hope to reduce the burden of work on health workers in health facilities which are often understaffed and overworked.

Our solution is centered around the use of Mavis talking books which is a technological innovation that provides pre recorded messages in any language. These messages can be tailored to any industry and the model is currently being used in education.

We will program the talking books with standardised messages on immunization from the Nigerian policy on immunization. We will also train health workers from selected facilities on using the books and deploy the books to rural health facilities in North central Nigeria.

To evaluate our solution, we will conduct baseline and end-line interviews with mothers in our study health facilities to assess their knowledge on vaccination at the beginning and end of the solution period respectively. We will also conduct baseline and end-line interviews with health workers to gauge the effectiveness of the books at reducing their burden of work.

The overall aim of this innovation is to help mothers understand the value of life saving vaccines and thus ensure their children complete their vaccination schedule. 

Our solution will be deployed in selected rural/suburban health facilities. Caregivers are required to visit the health facility with their child for vaccinations 5 times for the child to be completely vaccinated. Caregivers will access our solution everytime they visit the health facility to vaccinate their child. 

We have not yet deployed our Immunization talking books, hence no one is being served b those yet. However, the Mavis education books are being used by over 8,900 students and adults. 

The books are currently being used in education to make learning languages  (Nigerian and foreign languages) more fun and interactive for adults and children. There are also books on basic health care including breastfeeding, nutrition and hygiene.

The projects I currently work on are based in North central and North-Western Nigeria, therefore I have ties to state governments in these areas. I also have good understanding of the social construct and context for implementing innovations in rural areas. 

My team is