Discrepancies between general practitioners vaccination recommendations for their patients and practices for their children.

Monday, 19th of September 2016

Clin Microbiol Infect. 2016 Sep 4. pii: S1198-743X(16)30358-5. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2016.08.019. [Epub ahead of print]

Discrepancies between general practitioners vaccination recommendations for their patients and practices for their children.

Agrinier N¹ Marion LM² Fressard L³ Verger P⁴ Pulcini C⁵.

Author information

Abstract

OBJECTIVES:

- The objectives of our study were to describe GPs vaccination recommendations for their patients and practices for their children and to identify any discrepancies between them.

METHODS:

- Applying multiple correspondence analysis and agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis to data from a 2014 cross-sectional survey of a national sample of GPs we constructed a typology based on the patterns of associations between GPs vaccine recommendations to their patients and their own childrens vaccinations.

RESULTS:

- This study includes the 1038 GPs who reported they had at least one child aged 2-25 years. Nearly half (47% 482/1021) reported that all of their children were vaccinated against hepatitis B but that they did not always recommend that vaccine to patients; the same discordance was observed among 36% (369/1027) for the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine 19% (194/1013) to 28% (290/1019) for routine and catch-up meningococcal C vaccination and 27% (136/496) for the human papillomavirus vaccine. Cluster analysis showed that 37% (95% CI 33-39%) of GPs reported above-average rate of systematic vaccine recommendations for their patients and most reported that all their children were vaccinated (low level of discordance) while 60% (95%CI 58-64%) had a high level of discordance that is most reported that their children were vaccinated but did not always recommend the same vaccines to their patients.

CONCLUSIONS:

- Many GPs do not report the same attitude concerning the vaccination of their children and their patients. The reasons underlying these discrepancies possibly including vaccine hesitancy should be investigated.

Copyright © 2016 European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved