Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
2nd International Eurasian Congress of Social Pediatrics, Türkiye, 26 - 29 Kasım 2020
Objective: Vaccine hesitancy has come to the fore as an important problem in vaccination applications
all over the world in recent years. The purpose of this research is to determine the reasons, administrations,
and solutions in cases of vaccine hesitancy encountered by pediatricians working in the field of
Social Pediatrics in our country.
Method: The research is a cross-sectional descriptive study. Pediatricians working in the field of Social
Pediatrics constituted the study population. A total of 75 pediatricians were reached by e-mail and the
research was completed with 68 pediatricians. The data were collected through a questionnaire created
by the researchers by examining the medical literature. The questionnaire includes the questions such
as whether the participants encounter vaccine hesitancy, how often they encounter it, the age range
of the children of parents who have vaccine hesitancy, the type of vaccines with vaccine hesitancy, the
most common reasons in cases of vaccine hesitancy, the approaches applied when encountering vaccine
hesitancy and the suggestions of the participants about the prevention of vaccine hesitancy. SPSS
for Windows 17 program was used to evaluate the data. Descriptive statistics are given in the analysis
of the data.
Results: Among the participants 64.7% were working at a university hospital. While 54 of 68 physicians
(79.4%) stated that they encountered vaccine hesitancy, 11 participants (16.2%) stated that they did
not encounter vaccine hesitancy. Three participants (4.4%) did not answer this question. 29 (61.7%)
of 47 participants who stated frequency stated that the frequency was between 1-10%. Most of the
participants (74%) reported that vaccine hesitancy was most common in the 0-1-year-old infant group.
When those reporting two or more age groups were included, the cumulative frequency was 89.9% in
this group. Of the participants 70.4% reported that they encountered hesitancy in both routine and
non-routine vaccines. Among the reasons leading to vaccine hesitancy, reasons such as vaccine content,
undesirable effects, religious reasons, natural immunity obsession and media influence were the
leading causes. It was determined that most of the participants who faced with vaccine hesitancy talked
to the family and learned the reason for the hesitancy and informed the family. When the participants
were asked for their suggestions to prevent vaccine hesitancy, suggestions such as media communication,
family education, training and updating the information of healthcare workers, making campaigns and public service advertisements by the Ministry of Health, and regulating legal legislation on the
subject were offered.
Conclusion: Vaccine hesitancy poses a major obstacle to efforts to increase immunization rates. Pediatricians
working in the field of Social Pediatrics have important duties in combating this problem. It is
obvious that effective studies are needed in establishing the criteria to be used in revealing the size of
the problem and determining the approaches that can be applied to solve the problem.
Keywords: vaccine hesitancy, reasons, administrations, solutions