International approaches to a comprehensive assessment of the adults vaccination literacy

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that vaccination saves from 2 to 3 million lives worldwide every year. Neverthe-less, studies have shown a global decline in confidence and compliance to vaccination. This leads to a reduction in vaccination coverage and a recurrence of communicable diseases. It is important to assess literacy in the issues of vaccination, understand-ing, critical thinking and application of information to investigate the prerequisites of confidence and compliance to vaccination. Objective. To analyze international approaches to the comprehensive assessment of adults’ literacy in the issues of vaccination. Material and methods. The analysis is based on works published by foreign authors in English between 2013 and 2023 yrs. The con-tent analysis method was applied for selecting publications, including a list for certain criteria for inclusion and exclusion of ar-ticles. As a result of literature search in the PubMed database and the Internet, 20 publications were selected in the first phase, of which only 4 fully met the criteria for inclusion for further analysis. Results. The analysis of international approaches to the comprehensive assessment of adult literacy in the issues of vaccination has shown that tools for the comprehensive assessment of population’s vaccination literacy are limited. Vaccination literacy is in-fluenced not only by individual factors but also by social. Nevertheless, currently most of the existing tools are provided for investigation of only individual factors. The HLS19-VAC tool, which fully met the inclusion criteria, was developed in the framework of the HLS19 international study of the WHO Action Networks and was used in 11 European countries. The HLS19-VAC tool is a series of issues that allow to study the understanding, evaluation and application of vaccination information regardless of the context or any particular vaccine. It includes 1 question on personal vaccination behavior over the past 5 years, 4 questions on personal confidence in vaccines, 3 questions on myths and possible risks of vaccination, and 1 question on the risk of contamination by infectious disease, for which there is a vaccine, in case of not vaccinating. Conclusion. The obtained data can be adapted and used in the formation of evidence-based approaches to the literacy assessment in the field of vaccination of the adult population in the Russian Federation. © 2023, Media Sphera Publishing Group. All rights reserved.