How to Convince Hesitant Parents to Vaccinate Their Child

After successful years of vaccine acceptance in the past century, the anti-vaccine lobby has now become very active and many parents do not wish their children to be vaccinated anymore. Parents come up with different reasons, varying from emotional issues, religious believes and pseudoscience. More worrying is an anti-vaccine sentiment among paediatricians and healthcare-workers.

A drop in vaccine coverage may lead to new disease outbreaks, increased child mortality, serious treats to society and setbacks to global irradication programs like polio. Therefore authorities like WHO, EAP and national immunisation committees pay extra attention to vaccine hesitancy.

Somehow the vaccination success is now turning against us. People do not recognize the severe diseases anymore and medical incidents presumely related to vaccination have dropped confidence in vaccines in general.

It is difficult to propose an uniform guideline how the react on vaccine hesitancy. It is important to respect the refusing parents and not to rebuke them. Also your non-verbal attitude should be objective. When following a 3-step procedure below, you might be successful in overcoming hesitancy.

Step 1: Have an open, unprejudiced inquiry what people has moved not to vaccinate. Avoid that the conversation will end in a debate. Take time to listen to the parents and the arguments.

Step 2: Try to avoid to convince parents by scientific papers and facts. Provide the information at a level the parents can understand and give them websites where they can read or see objective information themselves. (e.g. Kahn academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6gpw_Deth8 ).

Make use of you-tube video’s to demonstrate more emotionally the benefits of vaccination

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgpfNScEd3M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWCsEWo0Gks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuLQ2GDVOHA

Step 3: Give parents time to make up their mind and reach a decision. Accept that some people still refuse vaccination. Give parents the opportunity to come at the office at any time if they changed their mind.

Ref. Larson et al.. Measuring vaccine hesitancy: the development of a survey tool.

Vaccine 2015;33:4165-75.

Larson et al.. The stat of vaccine confidence 2016: global insights through a 67-country survey

EBioMedicine 2016;12:295-301.