UNC Family Medicine Assistant Professor Nadja Vielot, PhD, was recently awarded a four-year K01 grant totaling over $620K by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The grant, “Developing and piloting an intervention to reduce human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination disparities in rural adolescents,” aims to improve HPV vaccination rates in rural North Carolinians to reduce the drastic urban-rural disparities in HPV cancer incidence and mortality.
Studies suggest that recommending HPV vaccination at the earliest possible opportunity (at age 9 instead of the universal recommendation at age 11) can increase the rates of vaccine initiation and completion before age 13, maximizing the preventive benefits of HPV vaccination and allowing more convenient vaccination options for rural children who have reduced access to healthcare. The objectives of the grant are to develop an acceptable and feasible clinic-based intervention that promotes recommending HPV vaccination to 9-year-old patients, to incorporate qualitative insights from caregivers into the intervention plan to minimize caregiver hesitancy, and to pilot this intervention in four rural clinics in North Carolina to assess the hybrid effectiveness-implementation of the intervention under real-world, pragmatic conditions.
Vielot states, “There are several benefits to recommending HPV vaccination at age 9, including capturing patients while they still reliably attend well-child visits and limiting vaccination encounters to the annual well-child visit. These logistical factors can reduce the burden of vaccination visits on parents, making it easier for rural children, who are less likely to receive HPV vaccination, to initiate and complete the series on time.”
This project responds to calls for systems-level interventions, rather than educational and communications strategies, that could have broader impacts in rural settings. This study’s findings will support the scale-up and broad dissemination of age-9 HPV vaccination recommendations for maximum impact on HPV cancer rates across the United States.