Improving Pneumococcal Vaccination Rates in an Inpatient Pediatric Diabetic Population

Background: Diabetes is an immunocompromising condition, and diabetic children should receive the 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide (PPSV23) vaccine as part of their preventive care because of their increased risk for invasive pneumococcal disease. This recommendation is often not followed, however, and at our institution, we discovered that a factor limiting vaccine administration was lack of knowledge about the recommendation among residents. Methods: Our objective with this quality improvement initiative was to improve pneumococcal vaccination rates among the inpatient pediatric diabetic population to 70% in 6 months. Three education and awareness initiatives were conducted during the postintervention period of March 2021 to August 2021 at St. Mary Medical Center in Shreveport, Louisiana. All pediatric diabetic patients from age 2 to 18 years who were admitted to the inpatient general pediatrics or critical care services were included. The primary outcome was vaccination with PPSV23. Results: We studied 63 pediatric patients with a mean age of 12.7 years. The vaccination ordering rate during the 6 months prior to the implementation of the quality improvement initiatives was 41%. In the 6 months postintervention, the overall vaccination ordering rate improved to 81%. During data collection, however, we discovered that even though the residents were assessing for vaccine eligibility and ordering the vaccines, not all vaccines were administered prior to discharge. In the preintervention period, the overall vaccine administration rate was 27%, improving to 42% in the postintervention period. Conclusion: Simple interventions that included resident education, development of a smart phrase in the electronic medical record, and liaison with pharmacy led to an increase in the pneumococcal vaccination ordering rate for pediatric patients with diabetes. However, we did not anticipate that the vaccination ordering and administration rates would be different when we initiated the project and had therefore focused our interventions on resident education only. Our discovery of the difference between vaccination ordering and vaccination administration helped identify 2 other areas for improvement: nursing education and additional improvement of the electronic medical record.