Association between access to a health facility and continuum of vaccination behaviors among Nigerian children.

Background: This paper examines the association between access to a health facility and the continuum of child vaccination behaviors, which include: uptake of each vaccine, dropout, and timing of vaccine take-up in Nigeria.
Methods: The health facility census data (2014) were merged into the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (2013) to calculate the distance between respondents' locations and the nearest health facility, and to evaluate its impact on the series of vaccination behaviors, using logistic and OLS regression.
Results: Among 21,369 children aged 12 to 59 months old, 78.2% of them were ever vaccinated. An additional distance of 1 km to the nearest clinic reduces the likelihood that one receives a vaccine by about 5% [OR: 0.952, 95% CI = 0.935-0.969]. Distance to the nearest clinic is mostly not associated with dropout rates in the vaccination series, but it delays the timing of vaccination, especially in the later stages of the vaccination series and Polio vaccination which require the mobilization from the supply side.
Conclusion: A longer distance to the nearest health facility is associated with lower vaccine take-up and delayed timing of vaccinations, but not with vaccine dropout. More studies should focus on the dynamics of vaccination decisions, in particular, the different determinants of vaccine take-up and dropout.