IntroductionVaccine hesitancy, defined as the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccination despite availability of vaccination services is responsible in part for suboptimal levels of vaccination coverage worldwide. The WHO recommends that countries incorporate plans to measure and address vaccine hesitancy into their immunisation programmes. This requires that governments and health institutions be able to detect concerns about vaccination in the population and monitor changes in vaccination behaviours. To do this effectively, tools to detect and measure vaccine hesitancy are required. The purpose of this scoping review is to give a broad overview of currently available vaccine hesitancy measuring tools and present a summary of their nature, similarities and differences.Methods and analysisThe review will be conducted using the framework for scoping review proffered by Arksey and O’Malley. It will comply with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews’ guidelines. The broader research question of this review is: what vaccine hesitancy measuring tools are currently available?Search strategies will be developed using controlled vocabulary and selected keywords. PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus and reference lists of relevant publications will be searched. Titles and abstracts will be independently screened by two authors and data from full-text articles meeting the inclusion criteria will be extracted independently by two authors using a pretested data charting form. Discrepancies will be resolved by discussion and consensus. Results will be presented using descriptive statistics such as percentages, tables, charts and flow diagrams as appropriate. Narrative analysis will be used to summarise the findings of the review.Ethics and disseminationEthics approval is not required for the review. It will be submitted as part of a doctoral thesis, presented at conferences and published in a peer-reviewed journal.Trial registration number
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The challenge of vaccine hesitancy, a growing global concern in the last decade, has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for monitoring vaccine sentiments and early detection of vaccine hesitancy in a population recommended by the WHO calls for the availability of contextually relevant tools and measures. This scoping review covers a ten year-period from 2010–2019 which included the first nine years of the decade of vaccines and aims to give a broad overview of tools and measures, and present a summary of their nature, similarities, and differences. We conducted the review using the framework for scoping reviews by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and reported it following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews’ guidelines. Of the 26 studies included, only one was conducted in the WHO African Region. Measures for routine childhood vaccines were found to be the most preponderant in the reviewed literature. The need for validated, contextually relevant tools in the WHO Africa Region is essential, and made more so by the scourge of the ongoing pandemic in which vaccination is critical for curtailment.
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