Pune civic body sets up walk-in cooler to increase vaccine storage
The walk-in cooler set up on the premises of Kalavati Mavale Hospital, Narayan Peth, was inaugurated by Ravindra Binwade, additional municipal commissioner, on Sunday
The Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) health department has set up a walk-in cooler to store routine vaccine stocks that arrive in the city and distributed to other civic healthcare facilities for the immunisation programme.
The walk-in cooler set up on the premises of Kalavati Mavale Hospital, Narayan Peth, was inaugurated by Ravindra Binwade, additional municipal commissioner, on Sunday.
As per officials, vaccines could be stored between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius before they are distributed to other healthcare facilities. The cooler has a capacity of 25,500 litres.
Dr Rajesh Dighe, city immunisation officer, PMC, said, the civic body already has three walk-in coolers at Kamla Nehru Hospital, Gadikhana and Narayan Peth which are used to store medicines.
“Range variation of the coolers is not acceptable when it comes to vaccine storage. Vaccines are temperature sensitive and due to this the coolers as per the government guidelines was tested. Thermal mapping with and without load was mapped for six days. Also, the temperature of four walls, roof, floor and door was mapped,” he said.
Dr Bhagwan Pawar, health officer of PMC, said that after the mapping was completed with help of experts from the National Cold Chain Resource Centre the walk-in cooler will now be used to store vaccines.
“Until now the vaccines were kept in the ice lined refrigerator but the demand for storage facilities has gone up,” he said.
“As many as 14 types of vaccines are given under the national immunisation programme and adult immunisation campaign. This has developed the need to have the adequate storage capacity to store the vaccines,” he said.