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Key points• Vaccine injections performed in childhood are a substantial source of distress.• Untreated pain can have long-term consequences, including preprocedural anxiety, hyperalgesia, needle fears and avoidance of health care.• Simple, cost-effective, evidence-based pain-relieving strategies are available.• A "3-P" approach, combining pharmacologic, physical and psychological factors, improves pain relief.

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Despite significant efforts by governments, organizations and individuals to maintain public trust in vaccines, concerns persist and threaten to undermine the effectiveness of immunization programs. Vaccine advocates have traditionally focused on education based on evidence to address vaccine concerns and hesitancy. However, being informed of the facts about immunization does not always translate into support for immunization. While many are persuaded by scientific evidence, others are more influenced by cognitive shortcuts, beliefs, societal pressure and the media, with the latter group more likely to hesitate over immunization. Understanding evidence from the behaviour sciences opens new doors to better support individual decision-making about immunization. Drawing on heuristics, this overview explores how individuals find, process and utilize vaccine information and the role health care professionals and society can play in vaccine decision-making. Traditional, evidence-based approaches aimed at staunching the erosion of public confidence in vaccines are proving inadequate and expensive. Enhancing public confidence in vaccines will be complex, necessitating a much wider range of strategies than currently used. Success will require a shift in how the public, health care professionals and media are informed and educated about vaccine benefits, risks and safety; considerable introspection and change in current academic and vaccine decision-making practices; development of proactive strategies to broadly address current and potential future concerns, as well as targeted interventions such as programs to address pain with immunization. This overview outlines ten such opportunities for change to improve vaccine confidence.

Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent information can threaten the validity of consent/authorization and potentially undermine trust in the vaccine program and the vaccine itself. Efforts are needed to improve the quality, clarity, and standardization of the content of written documents used in school-based HPV vaccine programs across Canada.

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One might speculate that the answer posed by the question should a parent be responsible for arranging to immunize a child, or for that matter reimmunize themselves would be a no-brainer. Most would say of course. Who can sensibly argue that prevention is preferred to treatment of disease? Yet many are not taking full advantage of the most effective means of preventing illness, disability and death caused by vaccine-preventable diseases.

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