Knowledge and attitudes of parents with children aged 0-5 about childhood vaccinations

Vaccination is one of the most successful and cost effective preventive health measures in disease prevention. There is a vaccine to prevent more than 20 life threatening diseases, helping people of all ages live longer and healthier lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) emphasized that the vaccine is very important for children's health and started an expanded immunization program to be implemented all over the world. The study was conducted with parents with children aged 0-5 years who applied to Denizli Province Yenimahalle Family Health Center between 01.08.2021 and 31.12.2021.The childhood vaccination knowledge and attitudes of the parents were questioned with the questionnaire form created as a result of the literature review and the "Parental Attitudes About Childhood Vaccines Scale (PACV)". It was determined that 98% of the parents had their children vaccinated regularly. 49.9% of parents had their children vaccinated for a fee. MMR is the most well known vaccine in the national vaccination calendar. It is the most known and administered Rota vaccine among the paid vaccines other than routine vaccines. Almost all of the participants in our study think that paid vaccines should be included in the National Vaccination Calendar. If these vaccines were included in the calendar and were free, it was determined that 84.6% of the participants in our study would have used almost all of these vaccines. Parents receive information about childhood vaccinations from family physicians and midwives-nurses at a rate of 63.2% during pregnancy. According to the PACV scale, it was determined that 95.9% of the parents had no hesitations about vaccination. According to the scale score, a statistically significant relationship was found between vaccination hesitancy, father's occupation and social insurance. The scale score differs significantly according to the total number of children, what is the number of children the child is mentioned, mother's education level, income status, social insurance, mother's occupation, father's occupation variables. If the information about childhood vaccinations is increased and paid vaccinations are included in the routine vaccination calendar, an increase may be observed in the vaccination knowledge and attitudes of the parents and the vaccination rates.