Vaccine Resources: Vaccinate Your Family, Herd Immunity PSAs, and Quality Improvement Study Opportunity for Practices

Vaccinate Your Family

If you are familiar with the Vaccinate Your Baby initiative offered by Every Child by Two (ECBT), you will be pleased to know that in anticipation of ECBT’s 25th anniversary the initiative is expanding to address timely vaccination of ALL family members. The new Vaccinate Your Family initiative will replace Vaccinate Your Baby. Please make sure to change any bookmarks or links to this program:

• Website: www.VaccinateYourFamily.org
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VaccinateYourFamily/ 

If you were not familiar with Vaccinate Your Baby, take a few minutes to explore Vaccinate Your Family. The hard-working team at ECBT is devoted to sharing scientifically-accurate information about vaccines, the diseases they prevent, and their safety as well as personal stories from those affected by vaccine-preventable diseases.

ECBT was co-founded by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter and former First Lady of Arkansas, Betty Bumpers.

Herd immunity PSAs

Ethan Posard is a student who was featured in the student-produced movie Invisible Threat and has since authored a book about his experience, The Shots Book. Inspired by what he learned, Ethan has established a YouTube channel with short PSAs meant to educate his peers about public health-related issues. The channel currently contains a series of PSAs (30 seconds, 60 seconds and 90 seconds) describing herd immunity.

Quality improvement study opportunity

The Unity Consortium is inviting practices to participate in a study related to adolescent vaccinations. Called “Pursuit of the Three Cs: Confident, Concise and Consistent Physician Recommendations for Adolescent Vaccines,” the study will offer multi-faceted communications guidance, an on-site training expert and research assistance to work with staff, and data collection to track progress and evaluate the impact of the intervention. Practices will not be charged any fee for participating and will be provided with a modest honorarium. In order to be considered, practices should meet the following criteria:

• Single specialty pediatrics practice with moderate to high volume of adolescent visits.
• Practice has at least five providers, which may include NPs and/or PAs.
• At least 90 percent of the providers in the practice must agree to participate.
• Participating providers should work at least 60 percent FTE, spend 70 percent or more time in direct patient care, and have been practicing between two and 25 years.
• Practice equipped with electronic health records that allow for generating blinded vaccination data/rates by provider. 

The following exclusion criteria should also be considered before expressing interest:

• Practice based in hospital/academic center.
• Practice cannot reside in Illinois, North Carolina, Rhode Island or Utah as new adolescent vaccination mandates for these states are starting in the current school year (2015-16). 

The team hopes to complete recruitment during February, so if you are interested, please contact Denise from InKlein Consulting directly at denise@inKleinConsulting.com or by phone at 215-527-0019.