(338) Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy through Health Behavior Models and Motivational Interviewing - The Student Perspective

Objective : Pharmacists play an important role in addressing vaccine hesitancy and training student pharmacists to do so is critical. Therefore, the objective was to assess students’ perceptions of their ability to address vaccine hesitancy using health behavior models and motivational interviewing after completion of a vaccine hesitancy assignment.

Methods: Student pharmacists received instructions on vaccine hesitancy, motivational interviewing, and health behavior models, including the Health Belief Model and the Transtheoretical Model within a first-year Introduction to Pharmacy Practice course. Students were presented with a vaccine hesitancy scenario and asked to respond to a series of questions. These included identification of the patient’s stage of change, management strategy, health belief model construct to be emphasized, motivational interviewing technique, and communication plan. Student perceptions were solicited via a brief and anonymous Qualtrics survey in 2022 and 2023 at the end of the semester. The anonymous survey included six items in a Likert-type format and student demographics.

Results: 68 students (2022) and 29 students (2023) completed the survey for a 72% and 32% response rate in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Over the two years, the majority of students strongly agreed that the vaccine hesitancy assignment improved their understanding of the pharmacists’ role in addressing vaccine concerns (70%), improved their understanding of the Health Belief Model (63%), improved their application of Motivational Interviewing (73%), improved their understanding of Transtheoretical Model (62%), overall was valuable to their learning experience (72%), and should be continued in the future of the course (73%).

Conclusions: Students had positive perceptions of their ability to address vaccine concerns in this application of communications approaches. Future iterations may incorporate more active role play to test the effectiveness of these interactions.