Doctors draw attention to the problem and warn about its consequences. The report of the Supreme Control Office confirms their concern. The number of children and adolescents required to receive mandatory vaccinations has been decreasing significantly for several years. Administrative and educational work is neglected.
In five years, the number of unvaccinated children has more than doubled and perhaps tripled, because the report of the Department of Higher Control shows that the system does not have everything under control. This is the beginning of a discussion to determine what needs to be changed and how to change it.
– Providing false addresses to which vaccination cards are sent, and those parents who do not want to visit the system and want to “disappear” their child from the system, can effectively do this – notes Dr. Pawel Grzesiowski, chief sanitary doctor. inspector
Children are “disappearing” and the system, which is essentially paper-based, supports the manual control of data, according to observers.
– Unreliable data reported by primary medical and sanitary aid, then repeated and collected by sanitary and epidemiological stations, and then presented in reports for the whole country, – says Piotr Miklis, vice president of the Supreme Audit Office.
Number of vaccination refusal NIK
We are losing the population's immunity to further diseases
Bottom line: we don't know where we stand, but we do know how low vaccination rates will end.
– Tuberculosis is a serious disease, polio is a disease that causes disability, so these are selected diseases that really threaten children – says prof. Joanna Zajkowska from the Department of Infectious Diseases and Neuroinfections at the University Clinical Hospital in Białystok.
Estimates show that in some places the vaccination coverage in Poland is less than 90 percent, and the goal of ensuring the safety of the population is more than 95 percent.
“This allows children who really cannot be vaccinated for various health reasons, and we were a protective barrier for them, and this barrier is breaking more and more – emphasizes Dr. Jacek Kidon, a pediatrician from the “Lechnica” municipal clinic in Lodz.
Polish two-speed
According to experts, in terms of health care, we have two sides in Poland. The first includes those who have been vaccinated.
– They live longer, their health is better, premature death is less in this group, and the second group of people who, for reasons unknown to us, because we do not fully understand them, do not do this and pay the amount of 1000. its personal price – informs prof. Jacek Wysocki, an infectious diseases specialist from the Medical University of Poznań.
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In theory, the penalties were supposed to tighten the system. 500 PLN for not showing up for mandatory vaccinations and 5000 PLN for regular evasion.
– The form of punishment and the inevitability of paying these decisions in one way or another, I think, will also be an effective form of pressure and increase the level of vaccination. This does not work at all at the moment, – says the head of the family medicine department of the Institute of the Polish Maternal Health Center in Lodz, Michal Matiaszczyk.
The Ministry of Health has focused on education and digitization of the mandatory vaccination system.
– The idea is that the vaccination card and the electronic vaccination card match, and all the vaccines that the child has and has not received are permanently visible in the system, – says Yakub Golab, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Health.
This is expected to happen next year.
Main photo source: TVN24
