Pediatric immunizations have proven to be one of most successful, safe and cost-effective public health interventions of the past 50 years. Worldwide, millions of childhood deaths are prevented by vaccinations every year. One of the most important ways to protect children from vaccine preventable diseases is to make sure that families and communities have access to timely and accurate information on childhood vaccinations.

To that end, the CMA Foundation has begun developing an adolescent vaccine toolkit, which will provide physicians with comprehensive information about best practices in adolescent vaccination. It will include communication tools for talking with parents and teens and approaches for talking with reluctant vaccinators. The toolkit will also contain the California school children vaccination requirements, multicultural communication tips and strategies for effective patient outreach.

"As vaccination requirements and policies continue to evolve, the CMA Foundation’s Adolescent vaccine toolkit comes at a time of great need," says Scott Clark, CMA research associate and member of the expert panel overseeing the development of this toolkit. "It will help guide providers and their practices through these changing times by touching on pressing issues such as vaccine hesitancy, patient-provider communications, and vaccine billing and coding, and as such, is sure to be very useful tool."

The adolescent vaccine toolkit is part of a larger vaccine underuse initiative that the foundation will launch in 2013. Stay tuned for additional details.