Skip to main content

Public Health Issue-Immunizations


I looked at immunizations at a public health concern. In the state of Colorado, all child care facilities are now required to report immunization records of all their children enrolled. Due to this change, the program I oversaw decided to require all children be fully immunized when attending our school. We chose to only accept medical exemptions not personal exemptions. We did this for one main reason, the safety of all of our children. Not only were we focusing on our children in the preschool but also our children who lived on campus in our residential treatment program.

When evaluating different public health concerns, this topic seemed most important to me because it was a topic I dealt with quite a bit the past two years. I live in a community where quite a few families chose not to immunize their child. When families came to tour our facility, it was always nerve wracking to see how families felt regarding immunizations. Some understood completely while others took it very personally that we had made the decision we had. We always talked through with them how we respected their decision to choose but as a program wanted to have safety for all of our children on campus and we were happy to help them find a preschool program that took personal exemptions.

In giving tours, I found that there are still a lot of families that believe immunizations have a negative effect on child’s health. In my research of immunizations in other parts of the world, I found that immunization knowledge Is lacking in other countries as well. I read an article that looked at immunization knowledge of mothers in Peshawar, Pakistan (Muhammad, Ali, Ahmad, & Fatima, 2017). This study looked at many different factors in the topic of immunizations, but what I found most interesting was the information presented on Mother’s overall knowledge. This article found the 20% of mothers in the study reported to have no awareness or any information regarding the process for immunizations. It was also reported that 40% of mothers had inadequate knowledge regarding the side effects of each immunization ((Muhammad, Ali, Ahmad, & Fatima, 2017, p. 3). This information was interesting to me because the article also discussed how the government is running many campaigns to present the importance of immunizations (Muhammad, Ali, Ahmad, & Fatima, 2017, p. 1-2). If the government is working to provide campaigns regarding immunizations, shouldn’t the knowledge rate of mothers be substantially higher? This article also states “every year more than 11 million children die under five years of age due to preventable diseases across the sphere ((Muhammad, Ali, Ahmad, & Fatima, 2017, p. 1). Although, the United States greatly pushes immunizations, it’s clear that neither the United States nor Pakistan are doing enough to decrease the percentage of preventable diseases. Our textbook discusses how parents still see immunizations as a possible cause of autism meaning the United States is in the same boat as the rest of the world in knowledge presentation (Berger, 2015, p. 164).

Based on the information I have learned from our textbook and the article on immunizations in Pakistan, I believe that my future work should include education for any family I work with on the concept of immunizations. I think this can be an emotion-driven topic of conversation, so I would make sure to present the information in a way that still allows families to choose but also give them an avenue to receive the information. I think it’s obvious what my stance is on immunizations and as an early childhood professional, I worked extremely hard the last two years to take a neutral stance when working with families. I think this would need to be key when working with families on the information of immunizations.

References

Comments