Delay of Acceptance of Covid-19 Vaccine Among Health Care Workers in Western Kenya

Abstract

Background: Healthcare workers play a key role in the prevention and control of communicable diseases but some studies have reported  concerns with their vaccine hesitancy. To address the concerns, there is a need to investigate the time to acceptance to inform  programmatic interventions. This study determined the time to acceptance and further investigated the possible reasons for the time to  acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine among the 256 healthcare workers in Homa Bay town sub-county, Homa Bay county in western  Kenya.

Method: A cross-sectional web-based study was done between August 2022 to October 2022. An online survey was used to collect  quantitative data, which was analyzed using SPSS version 23 and Pearson’s Chi-square test. However, the qualitative data was analyzed  using thematic.

Results: The uptake level was at 98.8% and 60.9% of HCWs accepted the vaccine within the first six months of rollout,  83.6% accepted it within the first year of vaccine rollout and 1.2% did not accept it after more than one year of rollout. The qualitative  results suggest the reason for the slow time to acceptance of the vaccine is side effects and concerns with the safety and effectiveness.  

Conclusion: The study shows that the time to acceptance of the vaccine by the HCW remains a public health concern. Consequently,  there is a need to explore strategies to improve the time to acceptance of the vaccines given the increasing pandemics. We recommend  further studies on time to acceptance with a cost-effective programmatic intervention.