New Training Intervention for Healthcare Professionals may Help Adolescents Start, Finish HPV Vaccination

A communication training intervention was developed to help healthcare professionals better communicate about papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines with adolescent patients and their parents. The training intervention increased initiation and completion of HPV vaccine series among both boys and girls.

More than 35,000 HPV-related cancers occur each year and effective vaccines against HPV have been available in the United States since 2006 for girls and since 2009 for boys. However, the vaccines are underused among adolescents and interventions to increase vaccination rates are being studied.

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Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, depending on the human papillomavirus that causes it, can result in common warts or can cause cervical cancer.

‘Disseminating communication training intervention among health care professionals may increase national adolescent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination levels.’

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16 primary care practices in Denver, Colorado, with half implementing a communication training intervention and the other half serving as a control group for comparison group; participants included 188 medical professionals and about 43,000 adolescents; the clinical trial was conducted between February 2015 and January 2016.

The communication training program for health care professionals had five components: fact sheets, a parent education website, images depicting diseases associated with HPV, a decision aid for HPV vaccination, and communication training for health care professionals (interventions); differences in HPV vaccine series initiation and completion for patients ages 11 to 17 in the intervention and control practice groups (outcomes).

This was a randomized clinical trial (RCT). RCTs allow for the strongest inferences to be made about the true effect of an intervention. However, not all RCT results can be replicated in real-world settings because patient characteristics or other variables may differ from those that were studied in the RCT.

Test Your Knowledge on Human Papillomavirus (HPV)
Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the most common sexually transmitted infection spread by person to person contact, mainly sexual intercourse and affecting the skin and genital areas. There are over 100 types of HPV and some types can cause cervical cancer. Take this quiz to test your knowledge on HPV.

The intervention could not examine at the patient level the effect of specific components of the intervention on HPV vaccination uptake.

Source-Eurekalert

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