The Academy is calling on pediatricians, chapters and parents to highlight how vaccines protect our youngest patients. The AAP-supported National Infant Immunization Week (NIIW), April 22-29, features opportunities to start conversations on the theme “Immunizations. Power to Protect.”
Pediatricians and chapters are invited to access several new AAP tools.
An interactive map, Child Vaccination Across America, at https://immunizations.aap.org/ highlights data on vaccinations by state, including outbreak data and trends. Users can hover their mouse over their state for details and compare their state with others.
Use this information and personal experiences to develop a blog to post on your website. Need writing tips? Access the Academy’s blog kit and instructions on how to share your published blogs with AAP staff and online (http://bit.ly/2meLdUs).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is calling for all bloggers to participate in a NIIW blog-a-thon. From April 22-29, pediatricians can post their blogs about topics that increase awareness of vaccine-preventable diseases, benefits of vaccines and common questions. Download a CDC badge to use with your post to let others know you’re participating, http://bit.ly/2lU8yYR. Once posted, email your link to [email protected]. Share others’ blogs throughout the week via social channels using hashtag #NIIW. The CDC will post a summary and links to blog posts on the NIIW website after the event.
Pediatricians who are on Twitter (Tweetiatricians) can share blogs with a broader audience using the hashtag #VaccinesWork and the CDC hashtag #IVax2Protect. Be sure to follow @AmerAcadPeds for details about participating in a planned CDC Twitter storm. The Twitter storm is a prime time to tweet your blog and help retweet AAP and CDC messages.
Additional AAP resources include:
- A toolkit to assist chapters in using state-specific data to tackle local challenges and personalize discussions in their state, http://bit.ly/2meLdUs.
- The AAP Voices blog, with observations from a featured immunization advocate, https://www.aap.org/en-us/aap-voices.
- AAP parent-friendly and parent-contributed articles on how infant immunizations protect their children and vulnerable populations, http://www.healthychildren.org.
- AAP News columns about infectious diseases and immunizations, http://www.aappublications.org/collection/id-snapshot and http://www.aappublications.org/collection/mmwr-review.
Find details about the AAP activities surrounding NIIW at http://bit.ly/2meLdUs.
