Barriers to uptake of childhood vaccination: protocol for a review of systematic reviews

Understanding and assessing the factors associated with under- or non-vaccination is critical to develop and target effective interventions to increase uptake. This is a protocol for an overview of systematic reviews that aims to identify all parent-level barriers to uptake of childhood vaccination and summarise the available evidence of the relationship between the barriers and vaccine uptake.

We will include systematic reviews that discuss or focus on parent-level barriers associated with uptake of vaccination for children under 5 years of age. We will extract data on any barrier shown or perceived by parents to be related to vaccine behaviour/uptake. We will search using key search terms on the Epistemonikos database. Two authors will independently screen for inclusion and data will be extracted on review features and barrier descriptions. Included reviews will be appraised and results will be narratively synthesised.