Between November 2022 and February 2023 work package 4 conducted a mapping exercise to map available courses and resources on older adult vaccination, designed for HCPs to have an overview of relevant national and international courses.

This overview informed the subsequent steps in the project (i.e. the workshops with HCP and the development of the educational framework. The search was conducted in English, French, Hungarian, Italian and Dutch and spanned the European, Oceania, and American regions. In total, 135 relevant learning opportunities were mapped.

In March-April 2023 we organized workshops in four EU countries (France, Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands) with healthcare professionals (HCPs) and older adult representatives. The aims of the workshops were to:

  • Select potential training and education interventions that match the different needs;
  • Assess the value of existing education materials (revealed in the mapping exercise) as input for new training activities;
  • Identify facilitators and barriers of existing training activities (how can we make our training activities as appealing as possible?).

In the previously conducted studies by WP4 we identified the information needs of older adults regarding vaccinations (focus group study), perspectives and information needs of HCPs regarding vaccines for older adults (interview study and online questionnaire), main receivers and spreaders of information on older adult vaccines among HCPs (online questionnaire), which interventions are most effective encouraging HCPs to discuss vaccines with their older adult patients (quantitative review) and the experiences of HCPs concerning discussing vaccines with older adult patients (qualitative review and online questionnaire).

Finally, we also identified what educational materials are already available to HCPs regarding older adult vaccinations. All these findings came together in the workshops.

Based on the information collected in the workshops, we were able to define the requirements regarding format, content, development, and implementation in practice of the educational framework that we are to develop in the upcoming year.

This framework will consist of a database with the courses we identified during the course mapping and of short videos in which an expert discusses topics related to vaccine communication.