What to do to prevent expired vaccines from reaching the vaccination room?

Recently, a health worker at a commune health station injected 4 doses of expired 6-in-1 vaccine into 4 children. The incident has not yet recorded any serious health problems for the children, but has raised concerns. This raises the issue that not only the vaccination unit must "prevent confusion" and ensure vaccine quality, but parents also need to participate in monitoring.

At more than 100 centers of the VNVC Children and Adult Vaccination System, vaccine preservation procedures and vaccination safety practices are strictly implemented, with many processes and personnel involved in "preventing" expired vaccines from "leaking" into the vaccination room.

Cold storage for vaccines meets national and international standards

Ms. Ngo Thi Tuyet Suong, Deputy Director of Quality of VNVC shared that, first of all, to ensure the quality of vaccines, VNVC invested in a cold storage system that meets international GSP standards with a network of 4 cold storage centers and more than 100 cold storages from 2-8°C spread across the country. In particular, VNVC also owns 3 deep cold storages, allowing international standard preservation of vaccines down to minus 86 degrees Celsius.

The vaccine storage area at VNVC is locked and monitored by a dedicated security system, an on-site audio warning system, and emails and text messages to the responsible department.

All VNVC vaccination rooms are equipped with specialized vaccine storage cabinets that meet GSP standards, with a synchronized temperature storage system, self-recording thermometers, and surveillance cameras. At the end of each day, unused vaccines will be collected by VNVC from the vaccination room to the cold storage at each center for monitoring at a higher level of safety.

According to Ms. Tuyet Suong, currently, some places still store vaccines in freezers and household refrigerators. The temperature may be displayed as 2-8 degrees Celsius, but in reality it is very difficult to ensure due to many factors such as continuous opening and closing time, power source, and density of goods inside. As for VNVC, not only strictly comply with storage temperature, control of expiry date, and safety of vaccines, but even a tilted or spilled vaccine vial, even if the lid has not been opened, is not allowed to be used.

Expired vaccines cannot "leak" out of the warehouse.

"To control the expiry date of vaccines, VNVC invested in a modern goods management software system, allowing tracking of each vaccine vial with full necessary information and monitored through a blocking software system, relevant departments cannot perform the export and import operations of vaccines with expiry date warnings. This helps VNVC closely control and early detect vaccines that are about to expire," Ms. Tuyet Suong informed.

Ms. Tuyet Suong emphasized that, with strict procedures and modern software tools, VNVC does not allow expired vaccines to be taken out of the warehouse, but must be transferred to a separate storage area to wait for refund or destruction according to regulations. The vaccine expiration management and warning system is set up in both the main warehouse and retail warehouse, so many layers of checkpoints will not allow expired vaccines to be transferred to the vaccination room.

Customers have the right to check the label and vaccine bottle.

Since its establishment, VNVC has advocated for public and transparent implementation of professional operations, while calling for responsibility and supervision of the vaccination safety process. All customers are carefully screened before being vaccinated at VNVC.

At the vaccination room, before injecting the client, the VNVC nurse must introduce the client to information about the vaccine, including the name of the vaccine, place of manufacture, expiry date, integrity of the vaccine (including the box and vial/cylinder containing the vaccine, solvent), dosage, route of administration, etc. The client is also instructed to check and compare with the doctor's instructions and take the paper box home to keep and refer to the information. This process must be witnessed by at least three parties: the nurse performing the vaccination, the nurse assisting the vaccination and the client or the child's guardian.

VNVC nurses are performing vaccinations on children.

"This is an important step for nurses and customers to compare and monitor vaccine quality by senses and vaccine information, strictly following the "3 rights" principle: correct type of vaccine, correct injection route, correct dosage," Ms. Tuyet Suong informed.

Not only that, VNVC also focuses on post-vaccination monitoring. In addition to 30-minute post-vaccination monitoring, VNVC also continues to advise and guide customers to monitor vaccination reactions for the next 72 hours at home and receive and guide timely treatment of post-vaccination reactions thanks to the team of doctors on duty 24/7.

What does VNVC have now?

VNVC is an official, strategic, comprehensive partner of major global vaccine manufacturers such as Glaxosmithkline - GSK (Belgium), Sanofi Pasteur (France), Pfizer (USA), Merck Sharp and Dohme (USA)... Therefore, VNVC conducts direct negotiations, imports large quantities of genuine vaccines, pre-orders large quantities of vaccines for many years, thereby ensuring sustainable supply to people at reasonable costs.

Currently, VNVC has more than 40 types of vaccines to prevent nearly 50 dangerous infectious diseases for children and adults. Many new generation vaccines such as quadrivalent influenza vaccine, pneumococcal 13, Menactra to prevent meningococcal meningitis ACYW, chickenpox, measles - mumps - rubella, 5 in 1, 6 in 1 vaccines, Imojev to prevent Japanese encephalitis, Prevenar 13 to prevent diseases caused by pneumococcus,...

VNVC works all days of the week and weekends, no lunch break, no holidays and often has promotions for customers.

Source link: https://thanhnien.vn/lam-gi-de-vac-xin-het-han-khong-the-lot-den-phong-tiem-185230513090252239.htm