Teams have been deployed in six provinces and two major cities in Eastern Visayas to monitor the implementation of vaccination rollout against coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).
Office of the Civil Defense (OCD) regional director Lord Byron Torrecarion said the regional task force on Covid-19 and the regional inter-agency task force on emerging infectious diseases created and deployed the monitoring and evaluation teams on July 15.
“The monitoring and evaluation team was created to assess the readiness and the ongoing implementation of the Covid-19 vaccination of different local government units,” Torrecarion said in a phone interview on Monday.
Teams are composed of personnel from OCD, Department of the Interior and Local Government, Department of Information and Communication Technology, Department of Health, Philippine National Police, Bureau of Fire Protection, National Bureau of Investigation, and National Intelligence Coordinating Agency.
Aside from teams from the regional level, there are also groups at the provincial, city, and municipal level, he said.
In the monitoring and evaluation, these teams will observe macro and micro plan, contingency, public service continuity plan, operation ability of the vaccination operation centers, and presence of protocol such as the proper handling of the vaccine, adverse events following the immunization protocol, reverse logistic, and waste handling protocol.
“They will also gather information on the Covid-19 response and the implementation of the Covid-19 protocol in our local governments and will also document the best practices for replication of other local governments,” he added.
One of the issues these teams want to prevent is the illegal transport of Covid-19 vaccines just like what happened in Northern Samar where 15 doses of vaccines were transferred from a cold storage facility at the Northern Samar Provincial Hospital to a house of a politician.
“That is exactly what we really want to achieve. To resolve or to prevent such issues in the future, that is why we came up with this monitoring and evaluation team,” Torrecarion said.
As of July 16, the region already received 524,450 doses of Covid-19 vaccines.
Source: Philippines News Agency
