Exploring Vaccine Hesitancy in Care Home Employees in North West England: a Qualitative Study

Overview

Journal BMJ Open

Specialty General Medicine

Date 2022 May 2

PMID 35501075

Authors

Amelia Dennis

Charlotte Robin

Leah Ffion Jones

Holly Carter

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objectives: Care homes have experienced a high number of COVID-19 outbreaks, and it is therefore important for care home employees to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. However, there is high vaccine hesitancy among this group. We aimed to understand barriers and facilitators to getting the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as views on potential mandatory vaccination policies.

Design: Semi-structured interviews.

Setting: Care home employees in North West England. Interviews conducted in April 2021.

Participants: 10 care home employees (aged 25-61 years) in the North West, who had been invited to have, but not received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Results: We analysed the interviews using a framework analysis. Our analysis identified eight themes: perceived risk of COVID-19, effectiveness of the vaccine, concerns about the vaccine, mistrust in authorities, facilitators to getting the vaccine, views on mandatory vaccinations, negative experiences of care work during the COVID-19 pandemic, and communication challenges.

Conclusions: Making COVID-19 vaccination a condition of deployment may not result in increased willingness to get the COVID-19 vaccination, with most care home employees in this study favouring leaving their job rather than getting vaccinated. At a time when many care workers already had negative experiences during the pandemic due to perceived negative judgement from others and a perceived lack of support facing care home employees, policies that require vaccination as a condition of deployment were not positively received.

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