Background: Protecting vaccines from freeze damage is a poorly addressed problem. We describe the effectiveness of the eLearning KeepCoool on cold chain maintenance in general practices.
Methods: For this intervention study, temperatures of vaccine refrigerators were logged at one-minute intervals. Personnel from practices with cold chain breaches was offered the eLearning. The primary outcome was the intervention's effectiveness to achieve temperatures in the target range (2 to 8°C) in the sixth week (follow-up) compared to the first (baseline). Using continuous temperature data, a generalized additive model for location, scale and shape was estimated.
Results: The practice response rate was 38% (64 of 168). At baseline, 73% of the practices and 68% of the refrigerators (51 of 75) showed cold chain breaches. 47% of the practices (n = 22 with 24 refrigerators) participated in the eLearning (55 physicians and practice assistants). At follow-up, 17% of those refrigerators were in the target range continuously, 38% reached targets 95% of the time while always >0°C, and temperatures ≤0°C decreased by 63%. Based on 2 million temperature data, the average Euclidian distance based on regression showed a significant improvement (p<0.05).
Conclusion: The eLearning KeepCoool improved the practices´ vaccine cold chain. It is freely available at https://keepcoool.ukbonn.de.
Copyright: © 2024 Thielmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.