Abstract
BackgroundIt is an important goal to vaccinate a high proportion of health care providers (HCPs) against influenza, to prevent transmission to patients. Different aspects of how a HCP vaccination campaign is conducted may be linked to different vaccination rates. We sought to characterize organizational factors and practices that were associated with vaccination campaign success among six sites within the Veterans Health Administration, where receipt of flu-vaccination is voluntary.MethodWe conducted a total of 31 telephone interviews with key informants who were involved with HCP flu vaccination campaigns at three sites with high-vaccination rates and three sites with low-vaccination rates. We compared the organization and management of the six sites’ campaigns using constant comparison methods, characterzing themes and analyzing data iteratively.ResultsThree factors distinguished sites with high flu vaccination rates from those with low vaccination rates. 1) High levels of executive leadership involvement: demonstrating visible support, fostering new ideas, facilitating resources, and empowering flu team members; 2) Positive flu team characteristics: high levels of collaboration, sense of campaign ownership, sense of empowerment to meet challenges, and adequate time and staffing dedicated to the campaign; and 3) Several concrete strong practices emerged: advance planning, easy access to the vaccine, ability to track employee vaccination status, use of innovative methods to educate staff, and use of audit and feedback to promote targeted efforts to reach unvaccinated employees.ConclusionSuccessful HCP flu campaigns shared several recognizable characteristics, many of which are amenable to adoption or emulation by programs hoping to improve their vaccination rates.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-016-1462-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
It is an important goal to vaccinate a high proportion of health care providers (HCPs) against influenza, to prevent transmission to patients
Successful HCP flu campaigns shared several recognizable characteristics, many of which are amenable to adoption or emulation by programs hoping to improve their vaccination rates
While previous studies have explored some of the organizational factors that may influence flu campaign performance in terms of achieving high vaccination rates, [7,8,9,10], much remains to be learned about this topic
Summary
It is an important goal to vaccinate a high proportion of health care providers (HCPs) against influenza, to prevent transmission to patients. The ACOEM published a guidance statement emphasizing the importance of educating, publicizing and offering the flu vaccine at convenient times and places as a way to achieve a high vaccination rate, instead of relying upon a mandate [3]. This emphasis underscores the importance of understanding organizational factors that impact the success of HCP-flu campaigns, especially when a mandate is not feasible [5, 6]. We sought to further explore and describe organizational these factors
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