UMass Chan Voices Broadcast with Grace Ryan
Vaccine hesitancy can pose a barrier to people deciding to protect themselves and families from many diseases with life-saving vaccines. Grace Ryan, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor in the Population and Quantitative Health Sciences department at UMass Chan Medical School focuses her research strategies to promote vaccine confidence and decrease vaccine hesitancy and resistance. Despite the potential of vaccines to save lives, many people have questions, and struggle with misinformation, as seen has been seen with the rollout of the Human papillomavirus (HPV) and COVID-19 vaccines. Oftentimes, the resistance is due to misinformation and lack of communication. In partnership with the Prevention Research Center (PRC) at UMass Chan and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Confidence Network, Dr. Ryan led the development of a program called CONFIDENCE, focused on improving local pediatricians’ communication with parents and assessing feasibility and acceptability, in hopes of decreasing vaccine hesitancy and improving pediatric COVID-19 vaccine uptake. CONFIDENCE (Clinicians for Effective COVID-19 Vaccine Conversations for Youth and Adolescent) included communication training with providers, a poster campaign with personal vaccination motivation stories, and parent-facing educational This intervention showed that combating vaccine hesitancy requires collaboration at the clinic and community levels, more specifically trusted relations between pediatricians and parents. On a new Voices of UMass Chan podcast episode, Dr. Ryan discusses her research on vaccine hesitancy related to the HPV and COVID-19 vaccines.
Listen to Grace Ryan, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor in the Population and Quantitative Health Sciences department at UMass Chan Medical School on Voices of UMass Chan discuss her research on vaccine hesitancy related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) and COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Ryan shares that…
Read more about Dr. Ryan’s work on vaccine hesitancy in her article feature on UMass Med Now.
