Mobile Nudges to Increase Early Vaccination Coverage in Rural Areas

NCT03797950 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 260

Last updated 2020-03-03

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Despite major progress made in vaccination coverage overall, timeliness of vaccines remains a key concern in many settings. At the same time, access to mobile phones has increased rapidly, offering new opportunities to track and deliver health services. This research project uses these newly available mobile phone networks to simultaneously address two of the biggest bottlenecks in vaccine delivery: timely documentation of births, and lack of maternal effort or access to get essential vaccines. To increase documentation, investigators will train volunteers in each community to report new births via mobile phone to a central coordinator, and send small monetary rewards via mobile phone to volunteers for this reporting. To increase vaccination coverage, investigators will send reminder messages directly to mothers, and will also test small monetary rewards to volunteers and to mothers as an incentive to complete recommended vaccinations. The designs to provide vaccination encouragement will be tested through a small community randomized controlled trial in 15 selected villages in Ghana's Northern region. The primary outcome for the pilot study will be the percentage of children who received both the polio birth dose (OPV0) vaccination within two weeks of life (14 days) and the BCG vaccination within the first four weeks (28 days) of life.

Conditions

  • Immunization Coverage

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Voice Reminder (Group A)

Woman with a recent delivery will be contacted via mobile phone by a central study staff member to encourage them to vaccinate their newborn with OPV0 and BCG, and information on where and when vaccines are available in this community will be provided. Community volunteers will receive small incentives for documenting births in the community.

BEHAVIORAL

Cash Incentive (Group B)

Mobile phone based monetary incentives will be provided to community volunteers and to women with a recent delivery who vaccinate newborns with OPV0 and BCG on time. Community volunteers will receive small incentives for documenting births in the community.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • Innovations for Poverty Action

    collaborator OTHER
  • Swiss Tropical & Public Health Institute

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Guenther Fink, PhD · Swiss Institute for Tropical and Public Health

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Sex
FEMALE
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2018-11-01
Primary Completion
2019-07-09
Completion
2019-07-09

Countries

  • Ghana

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT03797950 on ClinicalTrials.gov