Addressing parents' concerns about childhood immunizations: a tutorial for primary care providers

Area of Science:

• Pediatrics
• Public Health
• Medical Education

Background:

• Parental resistance to routine childhood immunizations is a growing concern.
• This resistance creates challenges for healthcare providers and impacts child health.
• A CD-ROM tutorial was developed to address these issues.

Purpose of the Study:

• Evaluate a tutorial's effectiveness in enhancing physicians' knowledge of parental vaccine concerns.
• Assess improvements in physicians' understanding of immunization adverse effects.
• Measure changes in physicians' attitudes toward parental vaccine resistance.

Main Methods:

• Pilot testing of a 45-minute CD-ROM tutorial with pediatric and family medicine residents.
• Knowledge and attitudes assessed using a 26-item pretest/posttest.
• Statistical analysis of pretest/posttest results.

Main Results:

• 122 residents completed the study.
• Statistically significant improvements in general knowledge about vaccine hesitancy.
• Clinically significant improvements in knowledge of adverse events and attitudes toward parental concerns.

Conclusions:

• The tutorial effectively improved resident physicians' knowledge and attitudes.
• This resource can enhance communication between parents and primary care providers.
• The tutorial offers a potential solution to improve responses to vaccine resistance.