Letters
Environmental health
Volume 199 - Issue 7

Utility of reports and routine correspondence from the National HPV Vaccination Program Register

Authors:  Julia M L Brotherton, Michael Batchelor and Karen Winch

Med J Aust 2013; 199 (7): 463. || doi: 10.5694/mja13.10737
Published online: 7 October 2013
To the Editor: The National Human Papillomavirus Vaccination (HPV) Program Register was established in June 2008 as Australia’s first national adult vaccination register.1 School-based HPV vaccination is now in its 7th year, and from February 2013 includes boys. States and territories report information about HPV vaccination at schools to the Register. This information is used to prepare coverage reports for program management, to provide completion statements to ...
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To the Editor: The National Human Papillomavirus Vaccination (HPV) Program Register was established in June 2008 as Australia’s first national adult vaccination register.1 School-based HPV vaccination is now in its 7th year, and from February 2013 includes boys. States and territories report information about HPV vaccination at schools to the Register. This information is used to prepare coverage reports for program management, to provide completion statements to individuals on completion of vaccination, and for program evaluation.

An additional function of the Register is to aid program delivery by providing a reconciliation of all reported doses for an individual and, where these are found to be incomplete (ie, < 3 doses), generating overdue dose reports for the provider who administered the most recent dose. One month after this report is sent to the provider (allowing time to check for missing doses and report these or prompting recall for further doses), a history statement is sent to the individual. This statement advises individuals of their current recorded vaccination status and requests that they attend for further vaccination or contact the Register if they have already been vaccinated. The latter may occur if, for example, the third dose was missed at school due to absence and was administered in general practice but not notified to the Register, or where an individual’s name or other identifying data have changed, preventing matching of new vaccinations with existing records.

The overdue dose reports and history statements for Victorian girls vaccinated in 2011 were sent in March and April 2012. In total, 2236 girls were sent history statements advising them that their vaccination course was incomplete. After these statements were issued, records were subsequently updated for 816/2236 girls (36.5%). Of these, 478 girls reported 617 doses previously received, 314 received 441 new doses, and 24 advised of new details that reconciled existing dose records.

The change in completion status of over one-third of girls with apparently overdue doses after the release of these statements, through prompts to update records or to obtain further vaccination, is a strong indication of the usefulness of the Register in providing a quality checking function over and above usual vaccination delivery systems at the jurisdictional level. This results in more accurate vaccination coverage data and a higher rate of completed vaccination courses.

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