Parental hesitancy about childhood vaccination
Citation: Crescitelli MD, Ghirotto L, Sisson H, et al. A meta-synthesis study of the key elements involved in childhood vaccine hesitancy. Public Health. 2020;180:38-45.
Language: English.
Free to view: No.
What is this? Some parents are hesitant about vaccination of their children against diseases such as COVID-19. Information on this may help policy makers who are implementing vaccination programmes.
In this systematic review, the authors searched for studies of parental hesitancy about childhood vaccination. They restricted their searches to articles published in English, Italian and Spanish and do not report the date of the search. They included 27 studies, which were from Australia (5 studies), Burkina Faso (1), Canada (1), the Netherlands (3), Spain (1), Sweden (1), Venezuela (1), UK (4) and USA (12).
What was found: Parents were hesitant to vaccinate their child because of risk perceptions of the vaccine and vaccine-preventable diseases; mistrust towards vaccine-related institutions, pharmaceutical companies, researchers, health professionals and information from the media; alternative health beliefs about childhood immunity, vaccine scheduling and the perceived toxicity of vaccinations; philosophical views on parental responsibility; and their information levels about vaccination.
This summary was prepared by Joly Ghanawi, edited by Sydney Johnson and finalized by Mike Clarke.