Chen, Yingyan, Prichard, Roslyn, Mason, Matt, Tower, Marion, Zimmerman, Peta-Anne, Sparke, Vanessa, Layh, Janice, Mehdi, Ahmed M., and Lin, Francis Fengzhi (2023) Barriers and facilitators to COVID-19 vaccine uptake among Australian health professional students during the pandemic: a nationwide study. Journal of Public Health Policy. (In Press)

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Abstract

Using a cross-sectional online survey we investigated knowledge, attitudes, and risk perception about COVID-19 vaccination and identified factors influencing vaccine uptake among Australian health professional students from October 2021 to January 2022. We analysed data from 1114 health professional students from 17 Australian universities. Most participants were enrolled in nursing programs (n = 958, 86.8%), and 91.6% (n = 858) of the participants received COVID-19 vaccination. Approximately 27% believed COVID-19 was no more serious than seasonal influenza and that they had a low risk of acquiring COVID-19. Nearly 20% disagreed that COVID-19 vaccines in Australia were safe and perceived they were at higher-risk of acquiring COVID infection than the general population. Higher-risk perception viewing vaccination as their professional responsibility, and vaccine mandate strongly predicted vaccination behaviour. Participants consider COVID-19 information from health professionals, government websites, and World Health Organization as the most trusted information sources. The findings highlight that healthcare decision-makers and university administrators need to monitor students’ hesitancy with vaccination to improve students’ promotion of the vaccination to the general population.

Item ID:	79162
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1745-655X
Keywords:	Health professional students, risk perception, vaccine heitancy, vaccine uptake
Copyright Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	03 Jul 2023 22:10
FoR Codes:	39 EDUCATION > 3902 Education policy, sociology and philosophy > 390299 Education policy, sociology and philosophy not elsewhere classified @ 60% 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4206 Public health > 420605 Preventative health care @ 40%
SEO Codes:	16 EDUCATION AND TRAINING > 1699 Other education and training > 169999 Other education and training not elsewhere classified @ 30% 20 HEALTH > 2004 Public health (excl. specific population health) > 200401 Behaviour and health @ 70%
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