Helping Providers Address Vaccine Hesitancy: Evaluating a Provider Intervention to Improve Conversations with Parents

Background:  Washington State has one of the nation’s highest rates of exemptions from school immunization requirements due to increasing numbers of parents delaying or refusing to immunize their children. Physicians are an important influence in parental decision-making regarding vaccinations. However, few providers have not been trained to address parental concerns about vaccines. Vax Northwest --A collaborative of public and private organizations concerned with vaccination rates in Washington State--developed an intervention that included training and a toolkit based on the principles of social marketing.  The intervention was aimed at increasing the ability of clinicians to address parental concerns regarding vaccination and encourage parents to immunize their children according to the recommended immunization schedule.  This intervention was pilot tested in 4 pediatric care clinics in a large healthcare system in King County.

Objectives:  To assess the integration of the vaccine hesitancy intervention into clinic practice.

Methods:  Data collection and analysis consisted of observation, post-training surveys, clinician interviews, and project staff interviews.

Results:  Overall, providers were satisfied or very satisfied with the intervention. The toolkit led providers to appropriate immunization resources for their patients and helped to increase their confidence when conversing with parents who are vaccine hesitant.  However, clinicians did not feel that the intervention significantly changed the number of conversations they had with parents or the content of those conversations.  They also had a number of recommendations for improving the intervention. 

Conclusions:  The evaluation of this pilot suggests that the intervention may be an effective means of helping clinicians address vaccine hesitancy in the clinical setting. Recommendations for enhancing the pilot intervention will be incorporated moving forward.  Based on this study, further evaluation efforts are being planned in Washington to determine whether the intervention will lead to improved physician self-efficacy, reduced parental hesitancy, and higher rates of timely immunizations.