Australia has 20.76% provider capacity required to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine alongside routine National Immunisation Program vaccinations.
Currently, Australia delivers approximately 11,959,893 encounters a year for the National Immunisation Program (NIP).
An Encounter, is a visit to an immunisation provider to receive one or more vaccinations.
Future Projections
The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates the population of Australia to be around 25,359,449. To obtain the 90% coverage rate for a 2-dose COVID-19, vaccination providers will be required to deliver an additional 45,647,008 encounters.
Adding it all up, that is a total of 57,606,902 encounters in a 12-month period.
That is the number of encounters required in Australian to maintain routine vaccinations for the National Immunisation Program and deliver the COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Program.
And that’s not all…
Add in the additional 8 million paid influenza vaccines that were available in 2020.
AND other paid vaccines (for which there is no summary data collected) such as Varicella dose 2, Hepatitis vaccines for occupational need, travel vaccines (although not much demand with COVID) and, well, you get the picture…
Hopefully the proposed AIR reporting mandatory updates will begin to give accurate encounter data in the coming years. All up, I think I lost count somewhere at the beginning of this paragraph, it was somewhere north of 65 million encounters.
By now your head may hurt as much as mine. Lots of numbers, lots of commas but it could be worse for Australia… we could be England.
England delivers 21.03million NHS funded vaccination encounters per year and will need to deliver 122.37million COVID vaccines while operating at only 17.20% provider capacity.
Provider capacity – state by state
Back to Australia. Let’s take a quick trip around the country to review the capacity on a state-by-state basis.
Immunisation provider capacity for each state is highlighted in Blue in the table below:
If you would like to dig deeper into the numbers, click here to download the spreadsheet.
This data
- breaks down per NIP age schedule for routine vaccinations
- provides data sources, and
- lists limitations, assumptions and exclusions from the data presented
That’s challenge number 1 – Immunisation provider capacity.
Click here to read Part 2: The Australian Immunisation Challenge – Vaccine Safety Monitoring.
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