Contact us

Australian Health Security Corps volunteer supporting Tonga to digitise immunisation records

Australian Health Security Corps volunteer supporting Tonga to digitise immunisation records

Gaps in workforce capacity present a major threat to health security in the Indo-Pacific region. To address this, Australian experts have been working with countries across the region in preventing, detecting and responding to infectious disease threats. Through the Australian Volunteers Program and the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security, the Health Security Corps was established to deploy volunteers and build capacity to prepare for and respond to infectious diseases.

Georgia first joined the Tongan Ministry of Health as a health information systems support officer in 2019. Working in partnership with the Beyond Essential Systems, her role focused on supporting the digitisation of health and medical stock records, and the expansion and rollout of mSupply, a system that tracks patient and medical stock data. Georgia's passion for using technology to drive efficiencies and quality improvements in health care motivated her to return to Tonga in 2020 to assist with the digitisation of COVID-19 vaccination data.

Georgia's return to Tonga for her second volunteer assignment is seeing her assist the Ministry of Health in using the mSupply system to digitally assign a unique vaccination number to every patient, track the cold chain of vaccines, track vaccine stock levels on a day-today basis, and provide a complete COVID-19 vaccination record for patients. These measures are particularly important in the remote outer islands where resources are limited.

"Part of why I love this role is the constant changes that come with trying to roll out a vaccine." —Georgia Lack

This excerpt is part of an article from the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security in celebration of International Day of Volunteers 2021. To read the full article, visit the website here.

Keep in touch

Infrequent updates via our mailing list

BES’ headquarters are on Wurundjeri land near Merri Creek in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. For thousands of years, Merri Creek provided Aboriginal people with many of the essentials of their day-to-day lives including water, timber and bark for building shelters, plant life for food and medicinal purposes, and animals for food.

We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people who are the Traditional Custodians of that Land. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders past, present and emerging of the Kulin Nation and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia.

Our acknowledgements extend to the traditional owners of the lands on which we work across the Pacific—including Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), where we recognise Māori as the Tangata Whenua of Aotearoa. BES commits to upholding their tino rangatiratanga over their lands, resources and taonga as described by te Tiriti o Waitangi.