National vaccination programme

High vaccination rates are key to preventing the spread of potentially serious infectious diseases, and indeed to eliminating some such diseases altogether. Vaccination programmes play a major role in public health, the aim being to protect the population’s health through both individual and herd immunity.

One of the ways to assess the impact of a vaccination programme is to measure vaccination coverage in the population. The vaccination coverage rate indirectly reflects the level of vaccination uptake by the population, as well as the medical profession's adherence to the national authorities' recommendations. Regularly assessing vaccination rates is a way of monitoring the above factors and identifying any variation that could impact the incidence of preventable diseases for which a vaccine exists.

In the absence of a nationwide vaccination register, periodic vaccination coverage surveys are the best way of assessing the level of vaccine protection in the population at large. There have been 5 such surveys to date: in 1996, 2002, 2007, 2012 and, most recently, in 2018. The 2018 survey ran from February until July, with the results published as a report in April 2019.