Social and psychological determinants of vaccination uptake - Linking attitudinal and behavioural data to policy analysis and implementation

疫苗接种方案的次优覆盖率仍然是全球卫生优先事项。每年，欧盟有6000万虚弱的成年人没有接种疫苗来预防流感。流感疫情可能导致全球50万至100万人死亡。世界卫生组织最近得出结论，与政策制定相关的高质量行为研究和广泛的伙伴关系对于应对这一挑战至关重要。正在进行的COVID19大流行可能会加剧人们对接种疫苗的一些担忧，特别是对流感疫苗接种的担忧(因为它们都是呼吸道病毒)，一些媒体已经对反疫苗接种进行了报道。该项目以社会科学方法为基础，在学术界、疫苗制造行业和政策制定之间提供了一种新型的合作伙伴关系。该项目将应用实施科学概念，这是一个相对较新的多学科领域，旨在加快将研究成果转化为卫生服务和政策(在这种情况下，旨在扩大流感疫苗接种覆盖面)。在文献回顾之后，该项目将首先在人群层面上对流感疫苗接种(作为样本疫苗)的担忧与国家疫苗接种政策和支持活动的重点之间进行比较“差距分析”。英国和德国是这项研究的重点国家。下一步，该项目将在与政策设计和执行利益攸关方举行的有组织的研讨会上(无论在哪里发现)解决这些差距。这些讲习班的成果将是由科学家、政策制定者、倡导者和其他利益攸关方共同设计的由行为证据提供信息的新型疫苗接种政策/运动简报。最后，该项目将制作以前开发的详细调查的简短版本，以衡量人们对流感疫苗接种的态度。将使用统计方法得出这些调查的简短版本，以便政策制定者更容易大规模实施。该项目是由利益攸关方驱动的，对正在进行的COVID19大流行很敏感。因此，我们将寻求将关于流感疫苗接种的成熟态度证据基础的经验教训应用于对COVID19疫苗(当一种疫苗广泛获得时)的潜在担忧。我们将进一步与利益攸关方磋商(这是拟议研究的核心阶段)，以便在全球大流行背景下有必要将拟议方法应用于季节性流感和COVID19疫苗接种计划。我们已经开始了这一转化过程：这项研究的学生和导师刚刚发表了我们所知的第一批关于英国COVID19疫苗的态度研究之一，这些研究基于流感疫苗接种接受度的理论和经验证据。这种灵活性使拟议的博士课程能够灵活地适应和有效地应对大流行的需要，以及在未来3年内在英国和全球范围内持续成功接种流感疫苗的需要。

Suboptimal coverage in vaccination programmes remains a global health priority. Every year 60 million frail adults in the EU are not protected against influenza by vaccination. Flu epidemics can cause between 500,000-1,000,000 deaths globally. The World Health Organisation recently concluded that high-quality behavioural research linked to policy-making and broad partnerships are essential to tackle this challenge. The ongoing COVID19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate some concerns about vaccination in general and about flu vaccination in particular (as they are both respiratory viruses), with anti-vaccination coverage already present in some media. This project offers such a novel partnership between academia, the vaccine manufacturing industry, and policy-making, grounded on social science methods. The project will apply implementation science concepts, which is a relatively new multidisciplinary field aiming to accelerate the translation of research findings into health services and policy (in this case, aiming to increase flu vaccination coverage). Following literature review, the project will firstly deliver a comparative 'gap analysis' between population-level concerns around vaccination for flu (as 'exemplar' vaccine) and what national vaccination policies and supporting campaigns focus on. The UK and Germany are the two countries of focus for the research. Next, the project will address these gaps (wherever found) - at structured workshops with policy design and implementation stakeholders. The outputs of these workshops will be novel vaccination policy/campaign briefs informed by behavioural evidence and co-designed by scientists, policy-makers, advocates and other stakeholders. Finally, the project will produce short versions of previously developed detailed surveys that measure attitudes towards flu vaccination. Statistical methods will be used to derive short versions of those surveys, which will be easier to implement at scale by policy-makers. The project is stakeholder-driven and sensitive to the ongoing COVID19 pandemic. We will thus seek to apply lessons from the well-developed attitudinal evidence base on the flu vaccination to potential concerns about a COVID19 vaccine (when one becomes widely available). We will further consult with stakeholders (which is a core phase of the proposed research) to apply the proposed methods to both the seasonal flu and the COVID19 vaccination programmes if the global pandemic context necessitates this approach. We have already started this translational process: the student and supervisor of this research have just published one of the first, to our knowledge, attitudinal studies of a COVID19 vaccine in the UK, informed by the theoretical and empirical evidence base on flu vaccination acceptance. This flexibility allows the proposed doctoral programme to flexibly adapt and effectively respond to both pandemic need and the need for ongoing successful flu immunisation in the UK and globally in the coming 3 years.