CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga — The provincial government of Pampanga has intensified its preparation for the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines.
Provincial Health Office (PHO) Head Jose Antonio Rivera said as early as December 2020, they have already crafted a plan to ensure the smooth roll-out of the vaccines once they are already available.
“With the help of Department of Health, we crafted our own system. We conducted strategic planning and established microplanning. We also continue to practice this and simulate for the preparation for the incoming vaccines,” Rivera said.
For Pampanga, vaccination will be hospital-based to reduce the anxiety of those who will be inoculated and to properly monitor and attend to any adverse effects following immunization, if there are any.
“In our system, we have pre-registration and pre-counseling prior to the actual inoculation. We also prepared a post vaccination site manned by a doctor. Vaccinated individuals will stay there for about 30 minutes to wait if there are any allergic reactions to the vaccine,” he said.
Rivera explained that under the system which they called the cellular system, there will be one or two cells in each hospital, depending on its size, with each cell having five stations and manned by 16-18 individuals which make up the vaccination team.
“In our estimation, a cell can do 240-400 vaccinations per eight hours. This figure should be uniform in all hospitals. The appearance of the counseling booth and post vaccination site will also be the same for easy replication. Basically, we have the same protocols regardless if you are vaccinated in a public or private hospital,” he explained.
All 11 district hospitals and the provincial hospital a well as a number of private hospitals that are willing to do the vaccination have already cells in place and are now doing their simulation exercises to see the location, efficiency, and expediency of the province’s vaccination plan.
For his part, Governor Dennis Pineda said the province already submitted 30,000 names to the national government as part of the masterlist of those who will vaccinated first.
“These include health workers coming from the public and private hospitals up to the level of the barangay health workers since they are our priority sector for this one. We hope that Pampanga will be included in the first wave of vaccines coming from the national government,” he said.
However, in case that Pampanga will not be prioritized, Pineda assured that the 30,000 names will be included in the 300,000 doses that the province procured.
“We ordered 300,000 doses for the first batch, and another 300,000 doses for the second batch. Our second priority will be government employees so that we will be protected whenever we render service to the public. We will also prioritize senior citizens since they are highly vulnerable and most of our mortalities come from their sector,” he said.
The governor added that he will talk to private companies who would be willing to purchase vaccines on their own, in order to help them in the procurement process.
“Even our mayors allocated separate funds for the vaccines. This is because we cannot solely rely on the national government to provide vaccines for the 2-2.5 million Kapampangans,” he said.
Pineda also shared that the province has procured cold storage for Pfizer Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines.