The vaccination roll-out programme in the basic education sector has been extended to next week 14 July 2021.
The extension became necessary when additional doses for basic education personnel became available. The extension will enable the sector to vaccinate more people but also to mop up where some sites experienced some technical challenges resulting in delays.
According to the Department of Health 437,386 educators and staff have now been vaccinated in the sector since the roll-out began. The initial target was 582,564.
The sector has also seen a strong demand for the vaccines in recent days. Provinces reported that more and more people were coming forward seeking to be vaccinated. More than 200, 000 more people have been added to the list of staff who will get vaccinated.
The numbers will improve significantly today as Limpopo will vaccinate today as part of the plan to use Friday and Saturday to administer the vaccines on basic education personnel.
A huge turn-out was reported today in various parts of Limpopo where educators and staff arrived to receive their single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
In order to address the challenges that have been experienced, the Department of Health has put in place the following measures to ensure that all eligible staff eventually get vaccinated;
- The Use of a paper form for the recording of the DBE Staff that cannot be found on the DBE Database on EVDS has been discussed at length during the EVDS Meeting on 8 July 2021.
- For the DBE Project, Paper records can now be used in a controlled environment, which would require a partnership between Provincial Education Departments and Provincial Departments of Health.
- DBE staff to be present at all sites – their role is to confirm that individuals that come for vaccination are from the Education Sector and are therefore eligible for vaccination. This should happen before the person enters the vaccination site.
- The EVDS admin staff need to check if the person’s record can be found – we are requesting that they check more than once as there might be a time lag between EVDS and the Lookup on the DBE beneficiary registry uploaded on EVDS.
- Should the person not be found on the EVDS database and there is a confirmation by DBE that the person is eligible for vaccination – the Vaccination can be recorded on the official vaccination paper record.
- There should be quality control for the use of the paper records – to ensure that the paper forms are completed with all the fields in full. The form should have a signature of the person that receive the vaccine as well as the vaccinator that administers the vaccine – This is your legal patient record if the EVDS is not used to digitally capture the vaccination at the point of vaccination.
- vEach site needs to have a process for collecting the paper forms in an organised manner and need to ensure that the forms are stored in a secured and safe manner.
- Provincial Departments of Health should make arrangements for the back capturing of the paper forms. NDoH EVDS team will continue to work with the EVDS leads to provide support where possible.
- Note that this arrangement is only for the DBE Vaccination Project.
- The ruleset with regards to the management of manual records, as provinces have been informed through the respective circulars, is still in place for all other streams of the Vaccination Programme. Which allow for paper records to be used in exceptional circumstances e.g. Electricity Outage and all manual records to be back captured on EVDS within 24-hours.
The Department urges all educators and staff to use the remaining period to get vaccinated.
Media enquiries:
Elijah Mhlanga
Head of Communication
Tel: 083 580 8275
E-mail:mhlanga.e@dbe.gov.za(link sends e-mail)
Hope Mokgatlhe
Spokesperson to Minister
Cell: 079 817 0427
