Reporting Vaccine Complications : What Do Obstetricians and Gynecologists Know About the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System?

الملخص EN

Background.

Obstetrician-gynecologists are increasingly called upon to be vaccinators as an essential part of a woman’s primary and preventive health care.

Despite the established safety of vaccines, vaccine adverse events may occur.

A national Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a well-established mechanism to track adverse events.

However, we hypothesized that many obstetrician-gynecologists are naive to the role and use of VAERS.

Methods.

We devised a ten-question survey to a sample of ACOG fellows to assess their knowledge and understanding of VAERS.

We performed descriptive and frequency analysis for each of the questions and used one-way analysis of variance for continuous and chi-squared for categorical variables.

Results.

Of the 1000 fellows who received the survey, 377 responded.

Only one respondent answered all nine knowledge questions correctly, and 9.2% of physicians had used VAERS.

Older physicians were less familiar with VAERS in general and with the specific objectives of VAERS in particular (χ2=10.7,P=.005).

Conclusions.

Obstetrician-gynecologist familiarity with VAERS is lacking.

Only when the obstetrician-gynecologist is completely knowledgeable regarding standard vaccine practices, including the availability and use of programs such as VAERS, will providers be functioning as competent and complete vaccinators.