Lay summary
There is an urgent need for NZ to broaden its approach to vaccine safety monitoring, to maintain community current confidence in current national schedule vaccines and importantly, to ensure a platform is ready for a COVID-19 vaccine. The aim is to develop and validate the use of a Smartphone-based SMS tool, via primary care with active follow-up of vaccinees post receiving vaccination
This activation grant will be used to determine if an automated real time SMS Smartphone-based vaccine-associated adverse event reporting system tool, already effectively used in Australia (SmartVax, AusVax), can be modified, enhanced and imported into the New Zealand system to produce KIWIvax. This will provide a community-used method to support the needs of New Zealand vaccine safety surveillance, and can be modified to accommodate monitoring new vaccines and related clinical occurrences of interest.