Vaccine Hesitancy in Pediatric Primary Care Practices

Abstract

Understanding how pediatric practices handle parental vaccine hesitancy is important as it impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of pediatric practices. In total, 21 semi-structured interviews with pediatric practice staff within a primary care network were conducted between May 2012 and March 2013. Thematic analysis focused on the barriers and challenges of vaccine hesitancy and strategies to reduce the burden at the practice level. Barriers and challenges of vaccine hesitancy included time constraints, administrative challenges, financial challenges and strained patient-provider relationships. Strategies to minimize the burden of vaccine hesitancy included training for vaccine counseling, screening for vaccine hesitancy prior to immunization visits, tailored vaccine counseling, and primary care provider visits for follow-up immunization. Pediatric practices reported many challenges when caring for vaccine-hesitant families. Multiple strategies were identified to reduce the burden of vaccine hesitancy, which future studies should explore to determine how effective they are in increasing vaccine acceptance in pediatric practices.

“A Huge, Hidden Problem”: Australian Health Practitioners’ Views and Understandings of Reproductive Coercion

“…Given the nature of the topic, we felt that individual interviews were more appropriate than focus groups. Similar methods have been utilized successfully in other recent studies with health practitioners asking them to reflect on sensitive areas of practice (Mohanty et al, 2018; Thomas, 2018). Interviews took place between July and September 2017, at a time convenient to the participant (often during a lunch break or gap between patients).…”

Previsit Screening for Parental Vaccine Hesitancy: A Cluster Randomized Trial

“…Parents have trouble openly discussing their vaccine concerns with providers, 4,5 providers struggle to accurately identify parental vaccine concerns, 6 and both cite insufficient time during health supervision (HS) visits to adequately discuss vaccines. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Screening parents before vaccine visits by using a parent-report measure to identify those who are vaccine hesitant has the potential to address these barriers. 13,14 Previsit use of parent-report measures are already well established in the pediatric primary care setting to identify family 15,16 and child psychosocial issues, 17,18 child developmental delay, 19,20 and behavioral health problems.…”

“…[7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Screening parents before vaccine visits by using a parent-report measure to identify those who are vaccine hesitant has the potential to address these barriers. 13,14 Previsit use of parent-report measures are already well established in the pediatric primary care setting to identify family 15,16 and child psychosocial issues, 17,18 child developmental delay, 19,20 and behavioral health problems. [21][22][23] Parent-report measures have also been found to be an efficient way to triage visits that may require more time for assessment, 24 enhance provider-parent communication by facilitating discussion of parental concerns, 25 increase early identification of problems and access to beneficial interventions, 26,27 and improve outcomes.…”

Exploring strategies to promote influenza vaccination of children with medical comorbidities: the perceptions and practices of hospital healthcare workers

“…This issue was also a common denominator amongst our participant especially amongst HCWs who care for children with highly complex and multiple medical conditions. Competing priorities is not an issue unique to the tertiary sector but also clearly exists for primary care providers [32] as well. In both settings, there is a need for further work to explore how to support providers to value and prioritise discussions about vaccination during their consultations.…”