Flutool Plus – using the WHO Seasonal Influenza Immunisation Costing Tool

Overview: Flutool Plus is the WHO Tool, designed to help lower- and middle-income countries in the process of costing of Seasonal Influenza Immunisation Programs. The aim of this course is to promote the dissemination and use of Flutool Plus. The course is meant for national program managers, who are responsible for mobilizing resources to set up sustainable immunisation programs for seasonal influenza.

Specifically, this course will help the participant to:

Become familiar with the structure and details of the FLutool PLUS

Have a global understanding of the model behind the tool

Be able to use the tool to create a costing of the national influenza program

Be aware of the optional elements of the tool

Be able to consult colleagues online to discuss and solve challenges in using the tool

Course contents

1. Background, objectives, and structure of the course:
This module introduces you to Flutool Plus. You will meet Akeem from the WHO Regional Office, who used to be a national Influenza Vaccination Program Manager. He will guide you through the FLuTool in these eight lessons.
In this introduction, Akeem explains the background, rationale and purpose of the Flutool. He will also explain the structure of this course, and what you need to know in advance to benefit most from this training.

Please make sure that you are able to open and use Excel Spreadsheet Files since FlutoolPLus is Excel-based. If you do not have the Microsoft Excel(tm) or Microsoft Office(TM) software, you may work with these type of files using the free package ‘OpenOffice’: https://www.openoffice.org/

2. Structure of Flutool Plus:
In this lesson you will get an overview of the structure of FLUTOOL Plus. This also covers the methods you need to understand to fully use the tool with confidence.

3. Output, reports and capability of the model:
This lesson takes a look at what you can expect from FLUTOOL PLUS.
– What will be the outcomes that you can later work with?
– How are reports shown?
– What are the benefits to you?

The lesson does not yet tell you how to enter the data. Instead, it will first help you understand how the tool summarises all data after you have completed all data entry. Flutool plus can be used for estimating costs of an influenza programme that has already been implemented (e.g. last year’s campaign). It can also be used to predict the future costs of a programme that is planned.
In this course, we will use the terms ‘prediction’ and ‘estimation’ interchangeably for the costs of the programme.

4. Overview of the set-up and basic input variables:
This lesson covers the basic setup of the tool: what variables do you enter first, to adapt this tool to your country’s situation? Enter the year for which you want to estimate the additional program costs, your national currency and the conversion rate to US Dollars, and the different levels of healthcare involved in the programme in your country.

5. Detailed costing input variables (part 1 of 2):
This lesson covers how to enter data for microplanning, procurement, vaccine distribution and cold-chain expansion.

6. Detailed costing input variables (part 2 of 2):
This lesson covers the remaining part of the setup: entering costs of training, social mobilisation, service delivery, supervision, monitoring and other program activities

7. Optional Self-directed Assignment:
In this version of the course, which is not moderated, you may choose (optionally) to perform a self-directed assignment as homework.
The lesson will explain to you what will need to be done. After having completed your task, you can view lesson 8, where the steps of the assignment are reviewed in detail.

8. Reviewing your work, and summary overview:
The final lesson of this course. Akeem takes you through the assignment, and by doing so, provides a demonstration of filling sample data in the Flutool

Course Credits