Strategies to Improve Vaccine Uptake throughout Adulthood

Abstract

Vaccine-preventable diseases represent a considerable burden on world health, and can have long-lasting consequences in those infected, especially in older adults, who can suffer functional decline, disability, and death. Vaccine uptake across the life course is desirable, but often suboptimal. A number of factors have been identified as contributors to low vaccine coverage, including sociodemographic characteristics, logistic factors such as ease of access and convenience, cultural attitudes including health literacy, and vaccine hesitancy. Strategies to improve vaccine uptake can target all the components underpinning low coverage, and include technology and communication-based strategies, physician-centered approaches, targeting healthcare workers for influenza vaccination, system-based factors, improved vaccine efficacy, and above all, political will and leadership.