“Design Thinking” for staff working in the South African Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI)

South Africa, like many other LMICs, continues to face challenges to increase and maintain targeted levels of vaccines uptake and coverage for routine immunization in all provinces. The national Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) managers, representatives from several pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccine production or distribution, academics, nursing staff, medical doctors from both the public and private sector gathered at the University Of Cape Town's Graduate School Of Business for the “design thinking” workshop. The aim of the workshop was to learn the process and techniques of design thinking in order to develop innovative solutions to the immunization challenges in South Africa. The workshop was a collaboration between VACFA and D-School.

To learn and implement the design thinking techniques, the following challenge was presented to the workshop participants: “re-design the expanded program on immunization, in a world where coverage is low in South Africa and the global EPI system has not changed much for the last 40 years despite a lot happening.” Approximately 40 participants were divided into six small working groups to create a shared understanding and experience, using design thinking principles. The process included time-defined brainstorming sessions which involved unconventional strategies.

At the end of the two day workshop, the groups presented innovative prototypes in 3D model format aimed to address some of the immunization challenges in South Africa.

After the workshop, the partnership between VACFA and D-School continued. The D-School’s last cohort of students for 2017 were assigned to tackle the following challenge that was proposed by VACFA: “Redesign the immunization data-capturing process for data managers/data capture clerks, in a world where data quality varies and there is a lack of post-immunization adverse event monitoring.”

Page created on 23 Feb 2018

Page last updated on 23 Feb 2018