This article originally appeared on the World Health Organization website. Below is an excerpt.
An essential part of deploying any vaccine is making sure the vaccine vials can be kept at the necessary temperatures while stored at and transported between national and local storage or health-care facilities. To strengthen Azerbaijan’s national vaccine cold chain system, the WHO Country Office in Azerbaijan has in the past year facilitated the procurement of cold chain equipment, including fridges and vaccine carriers, and trained local health-care staff on the use of the equipment and what procedures to initiate in different scenarios. Participants have included representatives from hygiene and epidemiology centres, health-care facilities and national health partners.
The most recent training, conducted in December 2022, focused on a small but critical device called Fridge-Tag. The Country Office has procured 2100 of these temperature-monitoring devices for Azerbaijan under the European Union (EU)-funded programme supporting an effective COVID-19 vaccination rollout and strengthening immunization systems in the EU’s Eastern Partnership region.
Learn more about how Azerbaijan strengthened their cold chain system and provided health workers with the information they need in the full article available on the WHO website.