Campaigns are focused activities designed to deliver a specific health product that addresses a particular health problem and/or public health challenge. Campaigns can lead to quick and cost-effective gains for the health problem or challenges that they target.
Polio eradication has the most experience with campaigns of any initiative in the world: over the past 30 years, campaigns in most of the world’s countries have delivered well over 20 billion doses of oral polio vaccine (OPV). Some polio campaigns have been used as a platform to deliver other products and health interventions; others have been entirely standalone. The degree to which polio-related activities— including surveillanceAn ongoing, systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of health-related data essential to the planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice., cold chain, and social mobilization—have been integrated into the broader health system has also varied considerably by setting.
This brief’s aim is to use polio’s rich experience to improve population health by providing lessons learnedAn insight on how to adjust what is being done based on experience or learning (describing what was learned and by whom to inform future research around campaign effectivenessThe ability of a campaign to achieve specific objectives related to coverage, equity, efficiency and impact. and efforts to align mass campaigns with routine health services delivery.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a particularly opportune moment to explore how campaigns could best be integrated across programs. In the short term, efforts to control COVID-19 have interrupted campaigns across the world, while in the long term controlling COVID-19 may require extensive vaccination campaigns once vaccines are available. This brief focuses on best practices and lessons learned on co-deliveryCo-delivery of interventions in campaigns occurs when most or all typical campaign components (microplanning, registration, logistics, implementation, and evaluation) are coordinated. Co-delivery, and collaborationCollaboration involves the sharing of specific campaign components between vertical health programs and can be thought of as collaborative delivery or partial of campaigns from polio programs in Ethiopia, India, and Nigeria—countries that have had a range of experiences with polio campaigns over the past 30 years.
This paper was written in conjunction with Synthesis and Translation of Research and Innovations from Polio Eradication (STRIPE).