P2B237: Educating Future Providers About Human Papilloma Virus

Purpose/Objectives: This project aims to address the lack of knowledge regarding Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and the HPV vaccine in Florida by creating an educational webinar and educational materials to distribute to providers and future providers of healthcare. The goal is that these efforts will increase current and future providers’ knowledge base of HPV, which can one day be translated into greater public knowledge and improved Florida HPV vaccination rates.

Design/Methods: An educational webinar and educational pamphlet on HPV and HPV vaccines were created and distributed to Florida’s medical and dental schools, and to the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. A webinar survey consisting of 3 demographic questions, 9 content questions, and 10 quality improvement questions was administered after the webinar to track usefulness of the webinar.

Results: Out of the 9 content questions in the post-webinar survey, 8 were answered correctly by all 20 participants after viewing the webinar. The one question missed was answered incorrectly by two participants. For the 10 quality improvement questions, a Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used to analyze the data as it was ordinally matched, not normally distributed, and comes from the same participant. The conditions for use of the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test including dependent observation (before and after measurements accounting for individual differences from baseline), assumed independence (even distribution of webinar to schools and Florida Chapter of AAP), continuous variable (survey questions sliding scale with maximum score of 5), and ordinal measurement (values compared on same scale or ranking system) were met. Analysis revealed a statistically significant increase in self-reported knowledge after viewing the webinar with regards to HPV and HPV vaccine hesitancy that was determined by the responses to two of the questions in the quality improvement section of the post-webinar survey.

Conclusion/Discussion: This project’s goals were realized, as survey data indicated a statistically significant difference between self-reported knowledge before and after completing the webinar. This suggests that short webinars such as this one are effective methods to improve current and future providers’ knowledge base. Future goals include observing trends in HPV vaccination rates in Florida and expanding the project into school and conference curriculums to increase provider HPV knowledge and HPV vaccine counseling comfort level.