BHOPAL: The corona vaccine’s dry run will be conducted at three places in Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, under the pan-India dry run programme of Covid-19 vaccination to be undertaken on Saturday. There will be dry run at three centres — Gandhi Nagar, Govindpura PHC and LN Medical College. Text messages will be sent out on mobile phones of the beneficiaries, which will guide them about the vaccination process and also remind them of the second shot after the first has been administered to them.
Objective of dry run
The objective of the dry run is to assess operational feasibility in the use of the Co-WIN application in a field environment, to test the linkages between planning and implementation and to identify the challenges and guide the way forward to actual implementation. The first round of the dry run was conducted in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat and Punjab on December 28 and 29 in two districts each, where five session sites with 25 test beneficiaries each were identified.
A session site would comprise three rooms — a waiting hall, vaccination room and an observation hall. Each team at a session site would have five members. The first vaccinator officer, ideally from the police set-up, has been tasked with the responsibility of maintaining Covid-19 safety protocol, including social distancing. The second vaccinator officer will check the genuineness of the beneficiary through the Co-WIN portal, while the third and fourth, drawn primarily from the health set-up, will be at the observation room to check for any side-effects post-vaccination and for information and counselling activity.
‘Mock drill to be held’
"The dry run has to be conducted at three sites in the state capital. The three sites are the community health centre, Gandhi Nagar PHC, Govindpura, and LN Medical College, where a mock drill will be conducted according to the guidelines and protocols of the Union health ministry. It won’t be conducted in the entire state. The other parts will be covered in the next phase," Dr Santosh Shukla, state immunization officer, said.
