2016

28 May 2016

Dr Wong Sin Yew opened our first ‘Meet the Infectious Disease Specialists™’ seminar of 2016 on Vaccinations and emphasised the importance of vaccinations to maintain health in children and adults to the participants. In addition to the national childhood immunization schedules, many developed countries have also introduced guidelines for adult vaccinations.

Dr Lam Mun San presented on the new developments in vaccines and went through in detail each of the new vaccines, including the stage of development, data from the pivotal trials and clinical

Dr Chan Si Min, Consultant and Head, Division of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, NUH, provided an update on childhood immunisation. Topics included were rotavirus, varicella and HPV vaccines and the upcoming vaccines. She also provided case examples on how she augmented vaccinations in children. Dr Chan discussed parental views on vaccine hesitancy and how she manages this issue.

Our next guest speaker, Dr Raymond Fong from Changi General Hospital provided an update on the important vaccinations to be taken before travelling.

In the final session of the seminar, Dr Wong started his session on adult immunization with cases he had recently encountered and vaccination indications. He then continued to discuss pertussis “resurgence” in adults, vaccination strategies, paradigm shifts in vaccine recommendations, the recently published adult vaccinations guidelines in Singapore, the role of Family Physicians in vaccination, the barriers to adult immunization and the 10 practice recommendations in adult vaccination administration.

Q&A followed as family physicians, nurses were interested to find out how to answer common patient queries.

Feedback provided by the participants indicated that there was good coverage of the topics and that the speakers were knowledgeable and delivered their presentations well.

We wish to thank our infectious disease and paediatric colleagues for taking their Saturday afternoon off to join us in providing these updates to the family physicians and nurses. We are also grateful to Sanofi for their support for this seminar.