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
Berger, K. S. (2015). The developing
person through childhood (7th ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
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