Summer is coming to an end, which means that flu season is right around the corner. Fittingly, August is National Immunization Awareness Month – a great time for people to ensure they and their children are up to date on their immunizations. We sat down with Laura Macomber, the System Director of Infection Control for Steward Health Care to learn about immunizations and how they protect communities. Laura is a nurse by trade and worked at Morton Hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts, for 36 years before going to corporate. Now she oversees the infection preventionists and employee health conditions.
Q: Why are vaccines important for public health? How can they protect individuals and communities?
Laura says every year, people get preventable diseases and illnesses like the flu or whooping cough. “As you know, there is a big push for people to get the flu vaccine every year. If health care workers such as myself and others at Steward are vaccinated, there’s a less chance of us getting the flu and thus less chance of us giving it to our patients,” she explains.
Laura says at Steward, “we encourage our patients to be vaccinated. Steward offers a flu season program starting October 1 to March 31, where we offer the flu vaccine to all patients. We do the same with our onboarding. We make sure that new employees have those vaccines when they join, and that protects them from being exposed when they work here.”
Q: What are the most common misconceptions about vaccines, and how can we address them?
Laura says the biggest misconception is that vaccines will give you the disease against which they are meant to protect. She explains that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the biggest misconception was that the vaccine was developed too soon, and the side effects were unknown.
She also notes that to ease these fears, Steward keeps people informed by putting out an FAQ during the flu season that discusses some of these myths that people have.
Q: What impact has COVID-19 had on public awareness and acceptance of immunizations?
Laura says it’s fairly split. “There are those that feel the vaccine helped, and others who are now more skeptical of vaccines and unknown side effects.”
“With my job, I have to respect people’s wishes. I can encourage people to get vaccinated, I can put fliers out there, I can build it up. But if they don’t want it, there’s nothing I can do about it,” she says.
She adds, “That being said, in healthcare here, if a staff member does not receive the annual flu vaccine, they have to wear a mask when they are within six feet of a patient on the units and everywhere except for the cafeteria. So, we do, we make sure that those that don’t get protected, still protect our patients.”
Q: What is the recommended immunization schedule for children, and why is it important to follow it?
Laura explains that children need to get vaccinated against diseases to prevent diseases like hepatitis, measles, pertussis, chicken pox. Most of all these vaccines are recommended before they enter school, she notes.
Q: For National Immunization Awareness Month, what do you wish people were more aware of when it came to vaccines?
Laura says, “I think I wish people were more aware of the benefits of the vaccines, especially in spreading it to not only our patients within our hospitals but their families.”
She adds “I think people don’t realize that when you are vaccinated, for instance, COVID, you can still get COVID.”
She also says people don’t realize that just taking that while a vaccine won’t always prevent illness, it will allow you to have a milder case. “If you’ve ever had the true flu, people say they’re sick for a week and body aches,” says Laura. “It’s really intense. If you have it when you have the vaccine, it’s not that bad in most cases.”
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