Immunisation survey 2023 findings
Published 17 November 2023
Applies to England
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The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) designed an online survey to find out what parents thought about vaccination. UKHSA commissioned the commercial research organisation, BASIS, to undertake to survey on their behalf.
Around 1,000 teenagers (school years 9 to 11) and 1,000 parents of teenagers (school years 9 to 11) completed the online survey between 22 February 2023 and 16 March 2023.
Confidence in the vaccine programme
Parents and teenagers had a high level of confidence in the vaccine programme:
- 86% of parents and 80% of young people agreed that vaccines work
- 80% of parents and 76% of young people agreed vaccines were safe
- 78% of parents and 76% of young people agreed that they trusted vaccines
Importance of vaccines
Young people thought vaccines were important:
- 89% of young people felt it was important that they got vaccinated
- 80% of young people had all the vaccines they were offered
Information sources
When asked about different sources of vaccine information:
- most young people (68%) and parents (75%) had only seen or heard positive information about vaccines
- over 60% of parents reported getting information about vaccines from NHS (67%) or school (62%) sources
- only 8% of parents reported getting information about their teenagers’ vaccinations from social media
- the majority of young people trusted recommended sources for vaccine information with the NHS (79%) and health professionals (74%) being ranked in the top 3 of trusted sources for young people – only 7% of young people ranked social media in the top 3 of trusted sources
Satisfaction with the vaccination service
When asked about vaccination services:
- 89% of parents were happy that the vaccines were delivered in school and 86% agreed that they had enough information to make a decision
- most young people were happy with how their vaccines were organised and delivered
- almost half of young people (48%) had concerns about the needle and 43% agreed that waiting for vaccination with their classmates made them nervous
Impact of the COVID-19 vaccine programme on attitudes
There was no evidence that the press and social media interest in the COVID-19 vaccine had had a negative impact on attitudes to the routine vaccination programme:
- 27% of parents stated that they felt more positive about vaccines following the press and media interest in the COVID-19 vaccine programme while 12% felt less positive
- 29% of young people stated that they felt more positive about vaccines following the press and media interest in the COVID-19 vaccine programme while 9% felt less positive – similar results were seen for trust in vaccines and vaccine safety
- of the 9% of teenagers who had refused or delayed at least one vaccine, over 70% specified the COVID-19 vaccine; numbers refusing or delaying the other teenage vaccines were similar to previous surveys
Resources
A parental attitudes results and teenager attitudes results slide sets of the survey findings are available to download.