Pamela Rockwell, DO
This is part of a series by the STFM Group on Immunization Education for National Immunization Awareness Month.
The CDC estimates that vaccinations will prevent more than 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths among children born in the last 20 years. The Affordable Care Act requires health plans to cover Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) immunization recommendations made after September 2009 without cost-sharing to patients.
Margot Savoy, MD, MPH
This is part of a series by the STFM Group on Immunization Education for National Immunization Awareness Month.
Immunization conversations can be a challenge even for the most experienced family physician. Even when both the physician and patient agree on the benefit of vaccination, the discussion may require navigating a complicated mix of public health, infectious disease, and immunology interspersed with patient fears about safety and benefit. Fitting that neatly into an already jam-packed 15-minute encounter can be difficult.
Jarrett Sell, MD
I consider my path to caring for persons affected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to be atypical, but maybe that is true of many family medicine providers involved in HIV care—only a minority of family medicine providers in the United States offer HIV care.
I, like many family medicine residents recently graduating from residency, assumed that HIV care was too complex and rapidly changing for me to become involved and that it would be unlikely to impact my future practice, particularly since I was planning to practice in a rural area. I thought that this was a condition that is best left to the care of specialists or those that planned to practice in the inner cities of San Francisco or New York. What I did not realize at the time was that HIV is everywhere and cannot be ignored by family medicine providers.
STFM Blog 