Abstract
The introduction of new vaccines depends on various criteria, including policies, clinical guidelines and economic considerations. Various stakeholders have differing criteria they view as important in selecting vaccines into a national immunization program. The present study aimed to identify factors impacting the adoption of new vaccines from the perspective of policy makers, healthcare professionals and healthcare administrators. The vaccine attributes identified from a literature review and semi-struc¬tured interviews were categorized into burden of disease, age group, budget impact, fever from vaccine, severity of disease, vaccine effectiveness and cost of vaccine. Main-effects orthogonal design was used to identify 18 profiles. Then a postal survey was conducted among policy makers, healthcare profes-sionals and healthcare administrators. Respondents were asked to choose the most important and the least important choices in each profile. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate importance weights of attribute levels, and then relative attribute importance was calculated. A total of seventy respondents completed the questionnaires (a 55% response rate), including 11 policy makers, 26 health¬care professionals, and 33 healthcare administrators. The attributes listed by all groups as being the most important for new vaccine adoption were severity of disease (35.9%), fever from vaccine (16.7%) and burden of disease (13.5%), respectively. Policy makers and healthcare professionals listed severity of disease (35.0% and 35.9%), fever from vaccine (22.9% and 17.0%) and burden of disease (14.8% and 15.3%) as the most important, respectively; whereas healthcare administrators listed severity of disease (32.5%), budget impact (15.1%) and fever from vaccine (15.0%) as the most important, respectively. New vaccines with high protection targeting severe disease in young children have a greater chance of being selected by respondents in the present study. The findings reveal the importance of attributes from public healthcare workers and will be useful for policy development of new vaccine adoption.
