An Interactive COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Workshop for Internal Medicine Residents and Medical Students

Introduction Since being first identified in December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 has resulted in millions of illnesses and deaths worldwide. Despite the safety and availability of effective vaccines that offer protection from severe COVID-19 disease, a sizable minority of the United States population has reported COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and remains unvaccinated. Methods We developed an interactive workshop for internal medicine residents and medical students in which a framework is utilized to aid the subtyping of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Learners then interactively apply this framework through vaccine counseling in a role-playing exercise. Results The workshop increased confidence in the learner's ability to determine the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy subtype after participation in the workshop (53% preworkshop, 81% postworkshop, p=0.01). The workshop also increased reported confidence in tailoring COVID-19 vaccine counseling after participation in the workshop (60% preworkshop, 90% postworkshop, p=0.005). These gains were also seen when participant learners were compared with nonparticipant learners for both subtyping confidence (81% postworkshop, 26% nonparticipant, p<0.0001) and confidence in providing tailored counseling (90% postworkshop, 60% nonparticipant, p=0.004). Conclusion The implementation of our workshop correlated with an increase in the reported trainee confidence related to COVID-19 vaccine counseling. This offers a promising early step in developing educational programs that build trainee skills in this domain. More work is needed to establish robust curricula to support learners in reaching patients who express COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.