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President Iván Duque announced on Monday morning that the first 50,000 doses of Pfizer vaccines arrive in Colombia today, which will be available for the first vaccination day in the country, on February 20. This, exactly two months after he himself announced the purchase of the first 40 million doses from various pharmaceutical companies.
Health Minister Fernando Ruiz said on W Radio that vaccination could begin before February 20. “Initially, the vaccination was scheduled to begin on February 20 (…) we will surely start a couple of days before. In Prevention and Action we will surely announce when the first puncture will occur“He said. However, he did not confirm a date.
Duque also indicated that “we have set the goal of vaccinating one million Colombians in the first 30 days of the vaccination process“, and added that” we set ourselves the goal of massively vaccinating Colombians, so that by the end of 2021 we would have vaccinated more than 35 million of us, around 70 percent of our population, which will allow us to be close to the herd immunity and being able to face 2022 leaving behind the fears of the pandemic “.
At this time, as the Minister of Health, Fernando Ruiz, has said, the country has been preparing in logistics issues to ensure that the execution of this unprecedented health campaign is massive.
In the middle of this process, for example, in addition to training thousands of health professionals, the specific responsibilities of all the actors in the sector have been defined.
EL TIEMPO consulted, precisely, the heads of the main health unions, who agreed to be prepared and at the same time raised issues that become imminent challenges.
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Juan Carlos Giraldo, director of the Colombian Association of Hospitals and Clinics (ACHC), recalls the experience that health workers have in vaccination plans and although he recognizes that the current campaign has connotations of greater volume and additional technical complexity, they are trained and in constant preparation to achieve a good result. “As soon as the first doses are applied and vaccination progresses, the confidence of the population and the agility of all entities will grow to achieve the goal of 70 percent of the immunized population,” he says.
However, it does expose concerns. For example, that although the IPS have their competencies defined with medium clarity, “We do not believe that other agents who have support and coordination functions have well defined their functions, and that can be seen reflected in gaps, redundancies or reprocesses ”.
Faced with human talent in health, Giraldo adds that all those linked to the sector were asked to be considered a priority, but they were divided into two groups, and evidence the difficulties that these personnel have had in knowing their vaccination shift due to delays in uploading the data to the Mi Vacuna portal. “All the adjustments must be made immediately to allow the loading of all the people we are registering,” he says.
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As soon as the first doses are applied and the vaccination progresses, the confidence of the population will grow
Olga Lucía Zuluaga, director of Acesi, a union of public hospitals, reinforces that, in general, providers have trained and made operational plans for the vaccination process, but progress is not the same and some regions “must still strengthen territorial tables so that there is adequate planning in the micro-territories and the success of the vaccination is guaranteed ”.
Juan Gonzalo López, president of the board of directors of Acemi, union of the EPS of the contributory regime, assures that in these two months they have assumed the preparation of the 21 responsibilities assigned in the vaccination plan, “such as the work articulated with territorial entities, updating of the database, information to the population, articulation with the IPS that have vaccination points for scheduling and monitoring of vaccination ”.
In addition, they have been coordinated with the Government through the Unified Command Posts. However, warning of difficulties in setting up the Coordination Tables with territorial entities and IPS by means of an administrative act, which is where guidelines and micro-planning are adopted. And he insists that users must update their data to facilitate contact.
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Elisa Torrenegra, executive director of Gestarsalud, which is part of the EPS of the subsidized regime, agrees on this, stating that the main challenge has been to achieve effective contact with all the affiliates, since there is a lot of rotation of telephone numbers. It also raises the challenges that some territorial entities are lagging behind in the process, on issues such as verifying the conditions of the vaccination posts, and that the IPS and the Government manage to coordinate the arrival of vaccines to the different territories and guarantee the schedules.
In turn, Carlos Dáguer, director of the Andi health assurance committee, emphasizes the work that the EPS have done in this time to achieve effective contact with their affiliates and leaves as a challenge to move from the micro-planning of the distribution, which It has been done on hypothetical scenarios, since exact amounts of each type of vaccine were not known, to one with millions of citizens to be done later.
Finally, Denis Silva, spokesman for the organization Patients Colombia, explains that during this time, as part of civil society, they have been working to provide real information about the benefits of the vaccine to users and to highlight the importance of updating data. And regarding the difficulties, he states that they have had “zero support from the EPS and the insurers have not given information on how to update the data; the Government does not want to support talks about vaccines ”. “The Government alone cannot achieve the goals on an issue that belongs to everyone,” he concludes.
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