Much has been written about the patient-physician relationship over the years. This relationship is essential in maintaining trust in the complex arena of modern diagnostic techniques, treatment and prevention, including vaccines and vaccine safety. However, a great deal of this material was written from the viewpoint of clinicians and academics. The patient voice may be positive or negative, fragmented or complex. Information sources are weighed and treated differently, according to the value system and risk perceptions of the individual. In post-trust societies, when people have less confidence in health authorities, communication needs to be more than a paternalistic top-down process. Notions of empowerment and individual patient choice are becoming crucial in medical care. The 'voice of the patient', which includes healthy individuals receiving vaccines, needs to be heard, considered and addressed. With respect to childhood immunizations, this will be the voice of the parent or caregiver. The key to addressing any concerns could be to listen more and to develop a communication style that is trust-based and science-informed. Regulatory agencies are encouraging clinical and patient-reported outcomes research under the umbrella of personalized medicine, and this is an important step forward. This paper attempts to reflect the paradigm shift towards increasing attention to the patient voice in vaccination and vaccine safety.
Agreement among uveitis experts on diagnosis is moderate at best but can be improved by discussion among them. These data suggest the need for validated and widely used classification criteria in the field of uveitis.
The highly complex and controversial topic of vaccine safety communication warrants innovative, user-centered solutions that would start with gaining mutual respect while taking into account the needs, concerns and underlying motives of patients, parents and physicians. To this end, a non-profit collaborative project was conducted by The Vienna Vaccine Safety Initiative, an international think tank aiming to promote vaccine safety research and communication, and the School of Design Thinking in Potsdam, Germany, the first school for innovation in Europe. The revolutionary concept of the Design Thinking approach is to group students in small multi-disciplinary teams. As a result they can generate ground-breaking ideas by combining their expertise and different points of view. The team agreed to address the following design challenge question: "How might we enable physicians to encourage parents and children to prevent infectious diseases?" The current article describes, step-by step, the ideation and innovation process as well as first tangible outcomes of the project.
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