Date of Award

5-2020

Degree Type

Capstone

Degree Name

Master of Science in Biomedical Sciences

Department

Public Health

Abstract

Vaccine hesitancy is a major public health concern in Pennsylvania, and the reasons for it vary from religious to philosophical. One subgroup of vaccine hesitant parents chooses not to vaccinate because they are misinformed and uneducated about the significance and the safety of vaccines. The objective of this study is to consider the use of an infographic to encourage pregnant women to ask their obstetricians about the importance and safety of vaccines as a way of increasing childhood vaccination rates.

Finding points of intervention to increase childhood vaccination rates is important. In order for a population to maintain herd immunity, 90% of that population needs to be vaccinated4. In China, a study was done to determine the effects of educating pregnant women about vaccines on the vaccination rates of their newborns9. The researchers saw significantly higher vaccination rates among the group that received education9. US obstetricians are prepared for this counseling because they were recently provided a toolkit by the CDC to guide their conversations with their patients.

The research strategy that will be utilized for this analysis of vaccine hesitancy will be a literature review of the current vaccination information that the average pregnant woman currently receives and the likelihood that counseling from her obstetrician would be efficacious. The expectations are that there will be studies supporting the fact that women often receive little to no vaccine counseling during pregnancy and are left to make an uninformed decision regarding the vaccination of their child. The end goal is to create a research-informed infographic to be displayed in obstetricians’ offices encouraging women to ask their doctor about vaccines.

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