National Partnership Agreement on Essential Vaccines 2013-2014

All State and Territory governments are eligible for reward payments.

Under the National Partnership Agreement on Essential Vaccines (the NP), State and Territory governments are eligible for reward payments if they achieve at least two of the four benchmarks listed in the NP. All State and Territory governments met this requirement.

The four benchmarks are:

• Benchmark 1: maintaining or increasing vaccine coverage for Indigenous Australians
• Benchmark 2: maintaining or increasing coverage in agreed areas of low immunisation coverage
• Benchmark 3: maintaining or decreasing wastage and leakage
• Benchmark 4: maintaining or increasing vaccination coverage for four year olds.

As illustrated in table 1:

• all jurisdictions met benchmarks 1, 3 and 4
• two jurisdictions (NSW and WA) could be assessed against benchmark 2:
  • NSW and WA achieved benchmark 2
• six jurisdictions (Victoria, Queensland, SA, Tasmania, the ACT and the NT) could not be assessed against benchmark 2, as these jurisdictions did not have identified areas of low immunisation coverage¹.

¹ Under the NP benchmark specifications, areas of low immunisation coverage are to be agreed by each State and Territory and the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth Department of Health has advised that, in practice, jurisdictions nominate areas of low immunisation coverage and provide relevant calculations to the Department.

Some jurisdictions advised that they had no low coverage areas, however no supporting information was provided to enable independent evaluation.

Therefore, for this assessment report, the Productivity Commission has maintained the approach previously taken by the COAG Reform Council of excluding this benchmark from assessment for jurisdictions with no nominated areas of low immunisation coverage.

The Department has advised that, for the next cycle of reporting, it will request jurisdictions advising of no low coverage areas for relevant information for verification. If this approach is adopted, the Productivity Commission will review its approach to this benchmark for the next reporting cycle.