Overview

With millions of children and adults leaving Ukraine during the war, and with deteriorating epidemiological situation faced by refugees and migrants, the risk of infectious diseases, causing severe illness and death, substantially increased. This crisis is further aggravated by sub-optimal routine childhood vaccination coverage and vaccination hesitancy affecting refugees and migrants from Ukraine, as well as lack of vaccine records, that create additional challenges for health care professionals, frequently not having clear national guidelines and/or training on providing vaccination to people with missing, delayed or interrupted vaccine series, while also addressing language and cultural issues that might be causing vaccine hesitancy.

This document aims to address some of the mentioned gaps by providing an overview of the documentation used in Ukraine to record and store the information about the vaccination, listing major vaccination hesitancy issues and ways to address them as well as referring the European and international guidelines on providing vaccination to people with missing delayed or interrupted vaccine series. it also contains the basic information on the abbreviations used for different types of vaccinations (examples in Ukrainian and Russian languages are provided), evaluation of the Ukrainian vaccination calendar and a comparison table between the Ukrainian and other vaccination calendars (EU and US). Though there are officially approved by the Ministry of Health of Ukraine forms of documents dedicated to vaccination records, these records may still vary depending on the health institution and the time they were made/provided.