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Telephone reminders about missed vaccines offered short-term effect
An intervention that involved contacting parents and their adolescent-aged children to come back to their clinician’s office for immunizations showed improvement in the short term, but not long term, according to study results.
Kathryn S. Brigham, MD, and colleagues of Boston Children’s Hospital published results of a study on children aged 13 to 17 years who were overdue for at least one of three immunizations. During the study, the investigators contacted either just the parents of the patient or both the patient and parents and then recorded whether the calls had any effect at 4 weeks after the intervention. The study team also assessed immunization records a year after the intervention.
Four weeks after the calls, there was an improvement in the group who received calls to both parents and their children. There was also a slight trend toward improved vaccination rates in the group of patients who received calls to parents only.
One year later, however, there were no significant differences between those who were called and those who were not, according to the study findings.
The researchers noted, however, some trends in which vaccines the children returned to the office to receive, notably tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis, meningococcal conjugate vaccine and varicella.
Although the intervention did not involve education regarding the influenza vaccine, there was a trend toward increased influenza vaccination rates in the two intervention arms compared with the control arm.
“The fact that we saw short-term gains in immunization rates 4 weeks after the outreach suggests that this sort of immunization outreach effort could be effective for time-sensitive immunizations, such as the annual influenza vaccine or even in the setting of epidemics, such as the recent H1N1 influenza outbreak and subsequent immunization effort,” Brigham told Infectious Diseases in Children.
The researchers noted some limitations, including the lack of being able to reach some of those in the intervention.
“We were pleased that we saw such a robust effect in our post-hoc as-treated analysis, suggesting that parents and adolescents are willing to be immunized, if you are able to contact them to let them know that the adolescent is overdue for the immunization,” Brigham said. “However, as anyone working with adolescents knows, it can often be very hard to make contact with this patient population, which is why it’s so important to look at multiple methods of outreach, potentially including email, social networking and texting.”
Disclosure: Dr. Brigham reported having served as a member of the Novartis US advisory board, but noted that Novartis had no role in the study design or writing of the manuscript.
