In order to avoid errors during vaccination, the Department of Health on Tuesday urged vaccination teams to limit the work hours and regularly rotate health workers.
Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said the incident in Makati where a health worker failed to push the syringe plunger while administering a vaccine was a result of “human error.”
“Let us not try to crucify the healthcare worker. We all make mistakes. What’s important is we were able to rectify,” she said.
“Let’s limit the time of our healthcare workers to just eight hours. Let’s not go beyond that. Let’s also rotate the staff so that they can rest and commit less mistakes,” she added.
Vergeire said each vaccination team, which is composed of six members tasked with screening, counseling, and monitoring vaccine recipients, inoculate at least 100 individuals in eight hours.
She added that vaccination sites should have roving supervisors to monitor and observe each station.
Vergeire said the public may ask vaccinators to show them the syringe before and after inoculation to ensure that they were properly vaccinated.
The DOH encouraged the public to send reports of breaches in vaccination protocol to authorities for immediate investigation and action.
“Our government guarantees this is an isolated case. We will be strictly monitoring all of our vaccination sites so this would not be repeated. We hope the public remains confident in the vaccination process,” Vergeire said.
“We have reverse logistics. All of our vaccination sites are instructed to count, one by one based on their tally, the number of syringes and vials of vaccines to ensure we did not miss anything and that our tally is complete,” she added.