The Vaccine Centre at the LSHTM hosted a meeting of the working group on urban immunisation on the 20th and 21st of May. Global health experts, researchers and policy makers discussed key challenges of delivering vaccination services in large cities, including in slums areas, which face multiple issues in the supply of and demand for services. With rapid urbanisation, notably in Africa, health care services need to adapt to different constraints. These include engaging highly mobile populations, negotiating the rise of private health care providers, and developing innovative service delivery models to maintain and increase vaccination uptake. Convened by UNICEF, the group of experts included members from the WHO, Gavi, US-CDC, Save the Children, JSI, The Gates Foundation, ACASUS, Public Health England and LSHTM.

The group will continue to support global and national implementers to develop and test new urban toolkit guidelines gotlife.gavi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Urban-immunization-toolkit.pdf, supporting the development of digital tools to highlight immunisation disparities and improve delivery of immunisation services in urban settings; and to develop implementation research to test and evaluate interventions to increase uptake.

During the meeting UNICEF immunization specialist Dr Godwin Mindra gave a public lecture on improving urban immunization outcomes the recording of which can be accessed here.