Increasing Confidence in the HPV Vaccine

HPV causes approximately 26,600 new cancer cases every year in the United States. HPV vaccination initiatives have helped lower HPV infection rates. However, vaccination rates still remain incredibly low. Less than 40% of adolescents that qualify for vaccination have completed a full series. Community engagement through focus groups, interviews, pre and post online surveys of parents have been shown to improve attitudes toward vaccinations. This is a qualitative cross-sectional survey using both quantitative and non-numerical data collected through interviews in order to further understand the reasoning of HPV vaccine hesitant parents who decide to either opt out of vaccination or fail to complete the vaccine series. The study seeks to implement educational strategies such as the testing of a website that works to close the information gap, the amount of available knowledge regarding HPV vaccination compared to the level of knowledge parents actually have. These strategies are implemented with the goal of addressing the concerns of vaccine hesitant parents and assessing their level of hesitancy before and after providing the requisite information regarding HPV vaccination through the interview process. The goal of this study is to both educate and aid in parents decision making when deciding to vaccinate their children for HPV. There is limited community based research available on HPV vaccination hesitancy amongst parents. The approach of using educational materials along with a webpage is new in addressing vaccine hesitancy with regards to HPV. This research could help increase HPV vaccination rates in order to lower HPV related cancers in the future. We found that knowledge played a critical role in improving attitudes toward the HPV vaccine and that improving the knowledge quality of vaccine participants may improve vaccination rates. This work was supported by the American Cancer Society. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.