ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1621699
This article is part of the Research TopicMeasuring Vaccination Perception, Confidence, and Uptake: Advancing Instrument Development and ValidationView all 3 articles
A qualitative interview study exploring barriers and facilitators to uptake of measles vaccination among healthcare workers at a London hospital
Provisionally accepted
- 1King's College London, London, United Kingdom
- 2NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Emergency Preparedness and Response, London, United Kingdom
- 3UK Health Security Agency, London, United Kingdom
- 4King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom
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This article describes barriers and facilitators to measles vaccination among healthcare workers at a London hospital. Furthermore, it discusses reasons why a substantial proportion of healthcare workers (HCW) do not know their measles vaccination status, despite vaccination screening forming part of the recruitment process at many hospitals. This can be problematic during an outbreak where rapid identification of susceptible individuals can help to contain the virus. As such, the article contributes to two of the journal's topics of interest (infectious diseases: epidemiology and prevention and occupational health and safety). Despite the focus on a single healthcare facility, we believe the findings have wider application. Due to the role of nosocomial transmission in recent measles outbreaks, ensuring that HCW are aware of their vaccination status and adequately vaccinated goes beyond occupational health and constitutes is a public health concern. Moreover, some barriers and facilitators reflect prior findings suggesting they are applicable to other contexts. Indeed, the limited knowledge of measles in this sample despite recent outbreaks at the hospital underlines the need for more to be done. The findings presented in this article can be used to design interventions to increase awareness of one's status and uptake of vaccination among HCW.
Keywords: Measles, MMR, Healthcare workers, Vaccination, Vaccine hesitancy
Received: 01 May 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Heinze, Smith, Curtis, Weston, Islam and Rubin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Nikki Heinze, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
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