The importance of vaccination for everyone
By rmjdafo, on 19 August 2016
It’s important that most people get vaccines
Most people get the vaccines offered to them as part of the NHS immunisation programme. They help prevent, and reduce the spread of diseases. Because of vaccines we no longer have smallpox anywhere in the world and polio is almost wiped out too.
For some vaccines, fewer people from some ethnic minority backgrounds get them compared to everyone else in the UK. For example, children from Nigerian, White Polish or Somali backgrounds are less likely than other groups to be vaccinated against Diphtheria in London (1). For other vaccines, more people from some ethnic minority backgrounds get them compared to everyone else. For example, one study found that children from Black and Asian backgrounds living in the London borough of Brent had higher uptake of the first dose of the MMR vaccine than children from White backgrounds (2).
Because of the way vaccination works, it’s really important that most people get the vaccines they are offered. If enough people get vaccines, protection is given to the people who cannot get them for medical reasons or are too young. So although the vast majority of people get vaccines, it’s still useful to understand why some people do not, so we can work out how we might be able to increase the number of people who get them. Because of the differences in who is and is not getting vaccines, we decided to explore what it was that might make children from ethnic minority backgrounds more or less likely to get vaccines.
What did we do?
In our new review, we looked at published studies where parents from ethnic minority backgrounds have been spoken to about why they had or had not chosen to vaccinate their children. We just looked a studies that had used qualitative methods, like interviewing parents and speaking to small groups of parents all at once (called focus groups). We used a technique called Thematic Synthesis to bring all of the findings together, which involves a number of researchers labelling the things that people had said and finding common themes within these labels.
What did we find?
Not surprisingly we found that most of the things that had convinced parents from ethnic minority backgrounds to get vaccines for their children, or had stopped them from doing so, were the same as the things that parents in general tell us. For example, parents had said that they were happy to go along with the doctor’s recommendation; that their decision had been influenced by other people and had found that things like transport problems had stopped them getting vaccines.
But there were also some things that had affected parents’ decisions about vaccines that were linked to ethnicity. For some parents, their religion instructed them about whether vaccines were needed for their children. Other parents were influenced by their experiences of having lived in other countries. For some, this made them appreciate the healthcare that is offered in the UK, but others felt that particular vaccines were not needed because they were not offered to them back home. Scare stories in newspapers or on the television can sometimes cause parents to worry about vaccines. We found that some parents who did not speak English had not heard these stories and so did not have the worries that other parents might. Some parents had wanted information about vaccines to be given to them in the language they speak at home. Finally, vaccines go through many years of testing and are studied in groups of people from all different ethnic backgrounds. Some parents said that they wanted to know about this testing, so that they could be reassured that their children would react to the vaccines in the same way as other children.
We now have a better understanding of why some people do and do not get vaccines
This research has helped us to understand why children from some ethnic minority backgrounds might be more likely to get some vaccines. It also told us the type of information that parents from ethnic minority backgrounds want to know about vaccines to be confident that giving their child a vaccine is the right thing. In some situations it might be a good idea to tailor information about vaccines to parents from particular ethnic minority backgrounds to make sure they are getting all the information they want to have.
References
- Wagner KS, van Wijgerden JCJ, Andrews N, Goulden K, White JM: Childhood vaccination coverage by ethnicity within London between 2006/2007 and 2010/2011. Arch Dis Child 2014, 99(4):348-353. DOI: 10.1136/archdischild-2013-304388
- Mixer RE, Jamrozik K, Newsom D: Ethnicity as a correlate of the uptake of the first dose of mumps, measles and rubella vaccine. J Epidemiol Community Health 2007, 61(9):797-801. DOI: 10.1136/jech.2005.045633