Practice Tip of the Week | Getting Back-to-School Ready with Immunizations

(Editor’s Note: This is a republish from a 2023 Practice Tip of the Week.)

By Mona Gonzales Croley MSN, BSN, RN

One of the most effective ways nurses can help promote good health and wellbeing is to promote on-time vaccination for their patients. Vaccines save lives and the nurses promoting timely vaccinations in their pediatric and adult patients are an integral part of doing so. In the United States, there are an estimated twenty-eight (28) Vaccine-Preventable Diseases that have associated vaccines available to prevent them (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.).

Nurses all do work that regularly improves the lives of their patients. Often this work involves activities that produce an immediate “positive outcome” that can be seen and felt by their patients and themselves. With the promotion of timely and appropriate vaccination in their patients, nurses may not see or recognize the life-saving results of their work. Unlike CPR and other immediate life-saving measures, the life-saving effects of timely vaccination are seen over time.

One great example of this is when a pediatric nurse sees a patient for a yearly check-up and the patient has been free of the vaccine-preventable diseases they were previously vaccinated against. The nurse may see the good in the fact that the patient has been free of these diseases, but they may not recognize their role in that. When patients are doing well and are healthy, it is easy for nurses to overlook the lifesaving work they do.

There are numerous programs and resources available to nurses in the promotion of timely and appropriate vaccination of their patients. These resources offer everything from how and when vaccines should be administered to where patients can get vaccines for free. In Texas, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) offers vaccine-specific information on their website, as well as being the state administrators for the Vaccines for Children (VFC) and Adult Safety Net (ASN) programs (Department of State Health Services, n.d.). These two programs offer free vaccines to Texas residents who are uninsured or underinsured. These programs are part of a federally funded program administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Like DSHS, the CDC provides significant online resources regarding vaccines and the diseases they prevent.

Outside of governmental agencies, there are organizations like Immunize.Org (Immunize.Org, n.d.), a vaccine advocacy organization, which offer information on vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases. Immunize.org’s mission is to “increase immunization rates and prevent disease by creating and distributing educational materials for healthcare professionals and the public that enhance the delivery of safe and effective immunization services” (Immunize.Org, n.d.). Immunize.Org and other organizations like it are working to prevent the transmission of vaccine-preventable diseases through timely and consistent vaccination of patients across the globe.

In line with the many different ways nurses save lives in their daily work, the promotion of timely, consistent, and appropriate vaccination is one of the easiest and most effective. Nurses are a dynamic and indispensable part of every healthcare system and organization, and as such, are vital to helping patients remain disease free and as healthy as possible. Like vaccines, nurses save lives.

REFERENCES

Department of State Health Services. (n.d.). Immunization Unit. DSHS Immunizations Webpage

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Vaccines & Immunizations.

Immunize.Org. (n.d.). Immunize.Org