ORLANDO – Putting parents at ease, making vaccination the default option during discussions, appealing to their identity as a good parent, and focusing on positive word choice during discussions are the techniques two pediatricians have recommended using to get vaccine-hesitant parents to immunize their children.
Jeff Craven/MDedge News
Dr. Katrina Saba
“Your goal is to get parents to immunize their kids,” Katrina Saba, MD, of the Permanente Medical Group in Oakland, Calif., said during an interactive group panel at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Our goal is not to win a debate. You don’t have to correct every mistaken idea.”
“And really importantly, as we know, belief trumps science,” she added. “Their belief is so much stronger than our proof, and their belief will not be changed by evidence.”
Many parents who are vaccine- hesitant also belong to a social network that forms or reinforces their beliefs, and attacking those beliefs is the same as attacking their identity, Dr. Saba noted. “When you attack someone’s identity, you are immediately seen as not like them, and if you’re not like them, you’ve lost your strength in persuading them.”
Dr. Saba; Kenneth Hempstead, MD; and other pediatricians and educators in the Permanente Medical Group developed a framework for pediatricians and educators to talk with their patients about immunization at their center after California passed a law in 2013 that required health care professionals to discuss vaccines with patients and sign off that they had that discussion.
“We felt that, if we were going to be by law required to have that discussion, maybe we needed some new tools to have [the discussion] more effectively,” Dr. Saba said. “Because clearly, [what we were doing ] wasn’t working or there wouldn’t have been a need for that law.”
Jeff Craven/MDedge News
Dr. Kenneth Hempstead
Dr. Hempstead explained the concerns of three major categories of vaccine-hesitant parents: those patients who are unsure of whether they should vaccinate, parents who wish to delay vaccination, and parents who refuse vaccination of their children.
Each parent requires a different approach for discussing the importance of vaccination based on their level of vaccine hesitancy, he said. For parents who are unsure, they may require general information about the safety and importance of vaccines.
Parents who delay immunization may have less trust in vaccines, have done research in their own social networks, and may present alternatives to a standard immunization schedule or want to omit certain vaccines from their child’s immunization schedule, he noted. Using the analogy of a car seat is one approach to identify the importance of vaccination to these parents: “Waiting to give the shots is like putting your baby in the car seat after you’ve already arrived at the store – the protection isn’t there for the most important part of the journey!”
In cases where parents refuse vaccination, you should not expect to change a parent’s mind in a single visit, but instead focus on building the patient-provider bond. However, presenting information the parent may have already seen, such as vaccination data from the Food and Drug Administration or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may alienate parents who identify with groups that share vaccine-hesitant viewpoints and erode your ability to persuade a parent’s intent to vaccinate.
A study by Nyhan et al. randomized parents to receive one of four pieces of interventions about the MMR vaccine: information from the CDC explaining the lack of evidence linking autism and the vaccine, information about the dangers of the diseases prevented by the vaccine, images of children who have had diseases prevented by the vaccine, and a “dramatic narrative” from a CDC fact sheet about a child who nearly died of measles. The researchers found no informational intervention helped in persuading to vaccinate in parents who had the “least favorable” attitudes toward the vaccine. And in the case of the dramatic narrative, there was an increased misperception about the MMR vaccine (Pediatrics. 2014;133[4]:e835-e842).
Dr. Hempstead and Dr. Saba outlined four rhetorical devices to include in conversations with patients about vaccination: cognitive ease, natural assumption, appeal to identity, and using advantageous terms.