Misssed Opportunity For Vaccination Among Under Five-Year-Old Children At Makadara Sub-County, Nairobi County

Abstract

Background:Immunizable diseases have been a major public health problem among under five-year-old children globally;of which Kenya is not an exception. According to KDHS (2014), 2 in every 3 Kenyan children were fully vaccinated, whereas in North Eastern 2 in every 5 children and in Mandera County 2 in every 10 children were fully vaccinated which implies a large number of children are still at risk of contracting immunizable diseases. Evidently, there’s a variation in immunization coverage at local level that could perhaps be attributed to factors specific to different localities. Objective:This research set out to investigate missed opportunity for immunizationamong under-five-year old children in Makadara Sub-county Methodology: This was a retrospective cohort study conducted at Makadara Sub-county. The study population comprised of under-five-year old children living in Makadara Sub-county. 248 children were recruited from the households through a multistage sampling approach. Data was collected using semi-structured questionnaires, entered and stored in Microsoft Excel 2013.Data cleaning, coding and analysis was done using STATA version 13. The main outcome of interest was the level of completion of vaccination depending on the age of the child.Univariate analysis was done to describe and summarize the data. The results were presented in graphs and tables The effect of the factors associated with the outcome was evaluated using multiple log binomial regression models. The risk ratio and 95% confidence intervals werereported.. Results: The study findings indicated that only education level and occupation type werefound significant. Mothers with low education are 48 % less likely to missed opportunity for their child (RR= 0.52 p-value=0.003) compare to those with high education xiv level. For occupation type, mother who are not working are 44 % less likely to missed opportunity for their child (RR=0.56 p-value=0.031) compared to those who are working. Conclusion: However, there’s need to increase the uptake of specific immunizationsespecially those given at 9 months (Measles ) whose rates were lower compared to the rest of the vaccines