Ashaiman NCCE, health directorates engage community on childhood vaccination

The Ashaiman Municipal Office of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), in collaboration with the Municipal Health Directorate, has engaged parents within Ashaiman, Lebanon, on vaccinations as part of the 2025 child health promotion week.

This year’s child health promotion week is being observed on the theme: “Every Child Deserves a Healthy Future, Invest in Your Child by Weighing Regularly”.

Madam Eliet Atsu-Masamaka, the Ashaiman Municipal Health Promotion Officer, said parents who often visited the weighing centres with their children were taught how to properly position and breastfeed their newborns.

Madam Atsu-Masamaka added that parents were also counselled one-on-one on their babies’ health and care.

She said if parents regularly invested in the well-being of their children and attended child health care clinics (weighing), it helped to prevent some diseases that had vaccines, as the children would be vaccinated against them.

She said if these vaccines were appropriately given to children, such preventable diseases would no longer exist for the country to fight, and the rate of child mortality due to these diseases would be reduced.

The health promotion officer explained that BCG was given to the child at birth to prevent tuberculosis even before they were discharged due to the Ghanaian culture of family and friends visiting during childbirth.

Madam Atsu-Masamaka pleaded with parents to stick to the vaccination schedule for their children to help them to complete their protection from preventable diseases.

She added that, apart from the vaccines, supplements were also given to the child until five years of age, adding, however, that due to school and other activities of the parents, the child missed their scheduled weighing.

To address this, she said the Ashaiman Health Directorate had put in an initiative named “Early Birds” where nurses get to the health facilities early and attend to parents who miss weighing sessions, adding that some nurses have also been assigned to schools to attend to the children and give them vaccines with permission from their parents.

“Sometimes, we inform the parents and ask them to include the child’s weighing cards and others in his or her bag, but if the parent disagrees, we schedule a time for them to bring their children to the health centres, and they are attended to,” she added.

She advised parents not to let their work or activities affect the vaccination of their children, as a lot of interventions had been put in place by the Ghana Health Service to protect children against diseases.

She urged parents to talk to the health professionals on issues with any of the vaccines, stressing that “Let us take weighing services and our child’s health seriously so that in the future, we will smile about the health of our children for ourselves, the community, and the country at large.”

Madam Salvata Mawulom Koku, the Ashaiman Municipal Director for the NCCE, reiterated that the commission collaborated with the GHS to create awareness of the need to promote child health, especially in the Ashaiman municipality.

Madam Koku the awareness is part of the annual African Vaccination Month and Child Health Promotion to ensure that children are given the necessary vaccination and immunisation to protect them from killer diseases.

She urged residents of Ashaiman to adhere to the education on child health and protect their children from the most preventable diseases, as children were the future of the country.

Source: GNA