Healthcare Professionals’ Discursive Constructions of Parental Vaccine Hesitancy: A Tale of Multiple Moralities

Abstract

Healthcare professionals play a crucial role in addressing the concerns of vaccine-hesitant parents since they form a trusted source for vaccine-related information. An increasing body of evidence suggests that healthcare professionals are faced with complexities when navigating the sensitive topic of parental vaccine hesitancy, as they balance their own vaccine- and context-specific concerns with institutional and societal pressures to vaccinate. Furthermore, health choices, such as parental choices for childhood vaccination, are often linked to moralisation. Given the emphasis on effective communication with vaccine-hesitant parents in the patient-centred care literature, it is important to consider healthcare professionals’ interpretations of parental vaccine hesitancy. Hence, a deeper understanding of how healthcare professionals make sense of, and moralise, childhood vaccination can help us understand how moralisation might appear in their communication with hesitant parents (in)directly. Drawing on a critical social–psychological framework for discourse analysis, this study analyses 39 semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals in Flanders, Belgium, and presents the discursive patterns articulated by healthcare professionals on parental vaccine hesitancy. The findings elucidate how healthcare professionals perpetuate, or resist, moral discourse in their accounts of vaccine hesitancy by constructing five different interpretative repertoires, that is, a “good” or “bad” parenting repertoire, a freedom of choice repertoire, an individual risk–benefit repertoire, a public health repertoire, and an accessibility repertoire. Our study highlights the complexities healthcare professionals experience in negotiating vaccine hesitancy, as their understandings of vaccine hesitancy are affected by, and contribute to, existing moral dilemmas and dominant discourses surrounding health and parenting.