A Needs-Based Analysis of Teaching on Vaccinations and COVID-19 in German Medical Schools

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for improving public confidence in vaccines. Academic gaps and redundancies on vaccinations must be identified to revise the medical curriculum for up-to-date training of medical students. This cross-sectional survey assessed the status of vaccine-related teaching in general and specific to COVID-19 in medical schools across Germany. A total of 4,313 medical students completed a questionnaire comprising items on national learning goals and perceived needs for teaching on vaccinations. Mixed methods were used to analyse data quantitatively for relative frequencies (%) and correlations between teaching items and semesters (Spearman’s rho), and qualitatively (content analysis). Our findings showed that 38.92% of the students were dissatisfied with teaching on vaccine-preventable diseases, but the perceived satisfaction increased in later semesters (r = 0.46, p < 0.001). Moreover, 75.84% and 68.15% of the students were dissatisfied with teaching related to vaccine scepticism and vaccine-related communication strategies, respectively. Furthermore, 63.79% reported dissatisfaction with teaching on COVID-19 disease and 72.93% with teaching on COVID-19 vaccines. A total of 79.12% stated they educated others on COVID-19 and its vaccines and 75.14% felt responsible to do so. A majority of the medical students were dissatisfied with teaching on dealing with vaccine scepticism, communication strategies and COVID-19 vaccines. We recommend practice-oriented vaccine education, especially for teaching communication skills to medical students.

Investigating Beliefs in Anti-Vax Conspiracy Theories among Medical Students

“…A positive conclusion from our study is that the difference between students of younger and older years of study was captured, and older students are less susceptible to the influence of conspiracy theories. This is in line with previous findings [45,85,92,93], as well as with Baessler et al, who additionally drew attention to the low perceived status of teaching on the topic of vaccinations, especially in the earlier semesters [94]. However, in the study by Lo Moro et al, as many as 8% of surveyed medical students did not feel adequately informed about vaccination [95].…”

Teaching undergraduate medical students how to communicate with vaccine-hesitant patients: A scoping review

“…Given the breadth of the search strategy, including four indexed databases and handsearching of reference lists, it is likely that no articles have been missed or inappropriately excluded. Several related studies were excluded as either no clear intervention was implemented (Afonso et al, 2017;Baessler et al, 2022;Caruso Brown et al, 2017;Dybsand et al, 2019;Kernéis et al, 2017;Pelly et al, 2010;Vorsters et al, 2010) or the intervention and objectives focused on improving vaccine knowledge rather than VH communication (Bechini et al, 2019;Marotta et al, 2017). Within the included studies, several (Kelekar et al, 2022;Koski et al, 2018;Lepiller et al, 2020;Schnaith et al, 2018) did not report outcomes of interest, including teaching duration, instructor background or outcome assessment, potentially influencing the outcomes reported in this review.…”