Debating vaccines in online parenting forums: What is the role of healthcare professionals?: Presenter(s): Ozan B. Mantar, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom

BACKGROUND: Although debates about vaccination resurfaced with the COVID-19 pandemic, they date back to the invention of the first vaccines, and have been especially active in recent years, often resulting in outbreaks such as the 2017 measles outbreak in the UK. Anti-vaccination and vaccine hesitancy has been acknowledged by WHO as one of the most urgent threats to global health. Social media and especially online forums are particularly important mediums in this regard as misinformation may easily take place and spread uncontrollably. Considering that healthcare professionals play a key role in building public trust regarding vaccinations, this study aims to examine how healthcare professionals communicate about childhood vaccines and how other users’ information attributed to healthcare professionals was shaped in the most popular UK parenting website, Mumsnet. METHODS: All posts about vaccinations in 2019 were manually extracted from the Mumsnet forum using the keywords jab(s), vaccin*, jag(s), injection(s), immuni*, vax*. This resulted in 10,995 total posts. A stratified random sample by month of around 15% (n = 1,563) was subsequently extracted and coded through content analysis. FINDINGS: Of the overall sample only a small percentage (1%, n = 16) of the posts were authored by a healthcare professional. However, these posts deserve attention due to their potential for impact in this environment. Early childhood vaccines were the most mentioned vaccines by healthcare professionals, and they mostly communicated directly to the posters (88%), and the most dominant topic was the share of experience/thought and side/adverse effects. DISCUSSION: In this study, which reveals healthcare professional-patient communication regarding vaccinations is not limited to physical, and the emergence of social media should be taken into care. Especially mediums that allow more personalised communication for patients pursuing an answer for their questions such as web forums play a key role in terms of public health.