(from the April 2024 Annals for Educators)
Vaccinations, as recommended by the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), are an essential component of comprehensive adult health care. Yet adult vaccination rates in the United States are suboptimal, leaving individuals, and in many cases also others in their communities, at risk for preventable illness. As a greater array of adult vaccines become available and dosing schedules and indications evolve, many factors contribute to suboptimal vaccination rates, including failure to think of vaccines as a regular component of adult care, physicians' and other clinicians' confusion about the recommendations, and vaccine hesitancy among patients. On February 7, 2024, Annals of Internal Medicine and the American College of Physicians assembled experts to provide practical information to better prepare physicians to implement the adult vaccination recommendations.
Use this article and the accompanying video to:
- Watch the program.
- Review the current CDC recommendations on adult vaccination.
- Consider the questions below:
- Do you routinely address vaccination with patients during clinical encounters in inpatient and outpatient settings?
- What are the barriers to addressing vaccination with your patients? Are there systematic changes that would eliminate these barriers?
- Role-play discussions about influenza, COVID-19, shingles, and respiratory syncytial virus with hypothetical patients who are eligible for these vaccines.
Annals for Educators is a Web Exclusives feature of Annals of Internal Medicine which includes activities using selected Annals articles to help medical educators in their teaching activities.
Back to the May 2024 issue of ACP IMpact