Frequently, a country will procure a single vaccine vial size, but the question remains whether tailoring the use of different size vaccine vial presentations based on populations or location characteristics within a single country could provide additional benefits, such as reducing open vial wastage (OVW) or reducing missed vaccination opportunities. Using the Highly Extensible Resource for Modeling Supply Chains (HERMES) software, they built a simulation model of the Zambia routine vaccine supply chain and looked at measles-rubella (MR) vials.
It was found that replacing 10-dose MR with 5-dose MR vials everywhere led to the largest reduction in MR open vial wastage (OVW), and improving MR availability by 1%. It was concluded that in Zambia, tailoring 5-dose MR vials to rural health facilities or by average session size results in the highest total vaccine availability compared to all other scenarios by reducing open vial wastage without increasing cold chain utilization.
Authors: Patrick Wedlock, Elizabeth Mitgang, Leila Haidari, Wendy Prosser, Shawn Brown, Kirstin Krudwig, Sheryl Siegmund, Jay DePasse, Jennifer Bakal, Jim Leonard, Joel Welling, Robert Steinglass, Frances Dien Mwansa, Guissimon Phiri, Buce Lee.
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