GPs remain the frontline in vaccination

The RACGP’s Victorian Chair, Dr Anita Muñoz, is calling for greater support to enable GPs to have vaccination discussions with their patients, as global organisations sound the alarm amid a rise in preventable diseases.
 
Outbreaks of diseases such as measles, meningitis and yellow fever, combined with misinformation, conflict and a rise in children missing routine vaccinations, has prompted a global plea for continued investment in immunisation programs, with ‘hard-won gains’ of the past 50 years now at risk.
 
This week, leaders of global agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO), have called for ‘urgent and sustained political attention and investment’ in immunisation.
 
‘Vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives over the past five decades,’ said WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. ‘Funding cuts to global health have put these hard-won gains in jeopardy.’
 
Measles is making ‘an especially dangerous comeback’, said WHO, with 10.3 million cases in 2023 – a 20% increase on 2022 cases.
 
In Australia, measles cases this year already exceed the total cases for 2024, while GPs face challenges among patients including vaccine hesitancy and fatigue.
 
Dr Muñoz said several strategies are needed to return Australia’s herd immunity back to 95%. However, she said funding for longer consultations is key to giving GPs the time to explain to vaccine-hesitant patients ‘why we feel everyone in Australia should be immune to measles’.
 
‘We do know that the single most influential person in a patient’s life, in terms of encouraging vaccination, is their GP,’ she told newsGP.
 
‘You’ve got a whole generation who probably doesn’t even appreciate what measles is, and what a threat it is.’
 
Dr Muñoz said it is ‘reprehensible’ that local councils, including three in South Australia and another in Western Australia, have passed motions calling the safety of vaccines into question.
 
‘Councils have the responsibility and duty of care in the community to keep them safe, but also provide people with truthful information,’ she said. ‘This is totally reprehensible, and whoever is responsible for that behaviour needs to be called to account.’
 
A poll conducted earlier this month by newsGP shows 24% of the 1047 respondents said vaccine hesitancy is a barrier to patients getting flu vaccinations.
 
Dr Muñoz says this reinforces the need to increase funding for longer consultations.
 
‘Simply just tacking it on to consultations for other things is not practical,’ she said.
 
‘We demonstrated during COVID, for example, that some people required 25 and 30-minute consultations to make the decision to have that vaccine.
 
‘Recognising in funding that it is a task that requires time, and an intensive exchange of information, is important.’
 
Dr Muñoz said awareness campaigns have an important role to play in addressing vaccine hesitancy, particularly amid the rise in measles cases, but that GPs remain a crucial and trusted voice in a ‘proper conversation’.
 
‘Awareness campaigns are helpful, but [they] really just increase someone’s interest in having a conversation,’ she said.
 
‘You need a proper conversation, which can take time, with a trained professional about the decision to vaccinate.  And the most influential and appropriate person to do that is a GP.’
 
She said the rise in vaccine hesitancy is ‘an enormous shame’, given the danger measles poses to young lives.
 
‘Measles is also many times more infectious than COVID is. And so this is a really frightening reality,’ Dr Muñoz said.
 
‘We did not have this renewed wave of vaccine hesitancy prior to the pandemic.
 
‘Now, everyone needs to work together to reassure the community that not only is the MMR vaccine safe, it can prevent a child from dying.’
 
Log in below to join the conversation.

health funding immunisation measles public health UNICEF vaccination vaccine hesitancy WHO