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- Title
Reporting vaccine complications: what do obstetricians and gynecologists know about the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System?
- Authors
Eckert, L O; Anderson, B L; Gonik, B; Schulkin, J
- Abstract
<bold>Background: </bold>Obstetrician-gynecologists are increasingly called upon to be vaccinators as an essential part of a woman's primary and preventive health care. Despite the established safety of vaccines, vaccine adverse events may occur. A national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a well-established mechanism to track adverse events. However, we hypothesized that many obstetrician-gynecologists are naive to the role and use of VAERS.<bold>Methods: </bold>We devised a ten-question survey to a sample of ACOG fellows to assess their knowledge and understanding of VAERS. We performed descriptive and frequency analysis for each of the questions and used one-way analysis of variance for continuous and chi-squared for categorical variables.<bold>Results: </bold>Of the 1000 fellows who received the survey, 377 responded. Only one respondent answered all nine knowledge questions correctly, and 9.2% of physicians had used VAERS. Older physicians were less familiar with VAERS in general and with the specific objectives of VAERS in particular (χ(2) = 10.7, P = .005).<bold>Conclusions: </bold>Obstetrician-gynecologist familiarity with VAERS is lacking. Only when the obstetrician-gynecologist is completely knowledgeable regarding standard vaccine practices, including the availability and use of programs such as VAERS, will providers be functioning as competent and complete vaccinators.
- Publication
Infectious Diseases in Obstetrics & Gynecology, 2013, p285257
- ISSN
1064-7449
- Publication type
journal article
- DOI
10.1155/2013/285257