Purpose: to establish the relationship between the personal attitude of medical workers to vaccine prevention and the level of preventive vaccination coverage of themselves and their children.
Research methods. Specially developed questionnaires, containing 22 questions about data on own vaccination, vaccination of children, sources of information from which health workers receive information about immunization, with an anonymous survey, were distributed with the help of a Google form on social networks.
Results. Despite the received answers about a mostly positive attitude towards vaccination, the vaccination rate of doctors themselves and their children obviously reflects the true attitude towards vaccination. Declarative and real attitudes to vaccination differ significantly. Among unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated respondents (25% of them), the main reasons for not vaccinating were medical contraindications (45.2%) and mistrust of the manufacturer (31.3%). Compared to previous studies, the fear of adverse reactions as a reason for refusing vaccination is much smaller, but the specific weight of mistrust of the manufacturer and medical contraindications is much higher.
Conclusions. Declared high commitment to vaccination (>94.0%) differs significantly from the true one (73.8%) when it comes to vaccination of health workers themselves and their children. Distrust of the vaccine and the manufacturer, as well as false contraindications, are the main reasons for refusal of vaccination among medical professionals. Not only primary care doctors, but also all health workers, regardless of specialty, need more knowledge about the importance of vaccination.
