A novel approach to evaluating the UK childhood immunisation schedule: estimating the effective coverage vector across the entire vaccine programme

BMC Infectious Diseases

Research Article

Martin Utley¹  Christina Pagel¹  Sonya Crowe¹  Jasmina Panovska-Griffiths¹  Guy Walker²  Peter Grove² 

[1] Clinical Operational Research Unit, University College London, 4 Taviton Street, WC1H 0BT, London, UK;Department of Health, Area 330, Wellington House, 133-155 Waterloo Road, SE1 8UG, London, UK;

关键词: Childhood immunisation programme;    Modelling framework;    Effective coverage;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12879-015-1299-8

 received in 2015-09-07, accepted in 2015-11-30,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe availability of new vaccines can prompt policy makers to consider changes to the routine childhood immunisation programme in the UK. Alterations to one aspect of the schedule may have implications for other areas of the programme (e.g. adding more injections could reduce uptake of vaccines featuring later in the schedule). Colleagues at the Department of Health (DH) in the UK therefore wanted to know whether assessing the impact across the entire programme of a proposed change to the UK schedule could lead to different decisions than those made on the current case-by-case basis. This work is a first step towards addressing this question.MethodsA novel framework for estimating the effective coverage against all of the diseases within a vaccination programme was developed. The framework was applied to the current (August 2015) UK childhood immunisation programme, plausible extensions to it in the foreseeable future (introducing vaccination against Meningitis B and/or Hepatitis B) and a “what-if” scenario regarding a Hepatitis B vaccine scare that was developed in close collaboration with DH.ResultsOur applications of the framework demonstrate that a programme-view of hypothetical changes to the schedule is important. For example, we show how introducing Hepatitis B vaccination could negatively impact aspects of the current programme by reducing uptake of vaccines featuring later in the schedule, and illustrate that the potential benefits of introducing any new vaccine are susceptible to behaviour changes affecting uptake (e.g. a vaccine scare). We show how it may be useful to consider the potential benefits and scheduling needs of all vaccinations on the horizon of interest rather than those of an individual vaccine in isolation, e.g. how introducing Meningitis B vaccination could saturate the early (2-month) visit, thereby potentially restricting scheduling options for Hepatitis B immunisation should it be introduced to the programme in the future.ConclusionsOur results demonstrate the potential benefit of considering the programme-wide impact of changes to an immunisation schedule, and our framework is an important step in the development of a means for systematically doing so.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Crowe et al. 2015