Knowledge, Attitude and Practice Towards Vaccination among Parents in Al Qassim Region, Saudi Arabia

Introduction: Immunization is the most effective health intervention which reduces hospitalization, morbidity and mortality. It’s become the vital part in public health and plays the major role in disease prevention but remains a controversial topic in our society. It has been recently reported by WHO that a large proportion of children fail to complete their immunization schedule. Aim: This study aimed to assess knowledge, attitude, and practice of parents towards vaccination and compare findings with demographic characteristics of the studied group. Materials and methods: This is a cross-sectional study to parents who work in Qassim schools (Buraydah, Unayzah, Al-Methnab, Al-Rass, Riyadh Al-Khabra, Al-badayea) and also distributed among health centers in villages and cities as well as hospitals. Validated questionnaire consisted of three sections that collected information on parents’ demographics, awareness, knowledge of vaccine benefits and practices regarding the immunization of their children were distributed among targeted parents. The questionnaire had brief explanation of the idea of the research to children parents. Data was collected through online and paper questionnaire, Responses to knowledge questions were recorded as “Yes”, “No”, “I don’t know”, “disagree”, “agree” and “neutral.” All data analyses were carried using SPSS version 21. Results: The overall mean knowledge score was 6.29 ± 1.95 out of 10 and moderate, good and poor knowledge were found to 66.9%, 26.6% and 6.5% of parents respectively. With regards to attitude, the overall mean attitude score was 19.2 ± 1.67 out of 21 and nearly all parents had positive attitude (82.7%) followed by average (16.1%) and negative attitude (1.2%). With regards to practice, the overall practice score was 20.9 ± 2.28 out of 24 and good, moderate and poor attitude were observed to 60.9%, 36.7% and 2.4% of the parents respectively. Furthermore, Child unable to complete vaccinations was identified as the significant factor of knowledge (T=-2.861, p-0.004), attitude (t=-3.469, p-0.007) and practice score (T=-3.642, p-<0.001). Conclusion: There is a moderate knowledge among parents toward childhood immunization while the consensus to attitude and practice deemed positive and good. Furthermore, unable to complete child vaccination was the significant predictor of knowledge, attitude and practice toward childhood vaccination.