Vaccination Information and Educational Resources from the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases

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Robert Hopkins, Jr, MD, NFID medical director, details a range of resources on the foundation's website including in-depth vaccine recommendations, live webinars, plus much more.

The following video interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Patient Care: What type of resources are available for primary care clinicians, on the NFID web site and from other reliable sources?

Robert Hopkins, Jr, MD: The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases has a number of reliable resources available for both health care professionals and the public. On our website, there are descriptions of many vaccine-preventable diseases, along with outlines of vaccine recommendations that are disease-specific.

We’ve also hosted a variety of webinars, with recordings available on the site to provide up-to-date information. For example, we just did one earlier this week on the respiratory virus season.

NFID also offers a couple of annual courses. Our Clinical Vaccinology Course, which is happening next week, is a 3-day program covering the basics of vaccinology—like the how, what, when, where, and why of vaccination. We also host a spring course focused on vaccinology research for clinicians who are interested in that dimension of the field.

Beyond NFID, the CDC has some excellent resources as well. For instance, they’ve recently launched a respiratory illness data channel that allows you to drill down into the current status of respiratory viruses in your own community.

And don’t forget about professional organizations like the American College of Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Academy of Family Physicians, and others—they all provide great additional resources.

There’s a lot of information out there. The key is to make sure we’re using reliable sources.

Robert J Hopkins, Jr, MD, is the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and professor of internal medicine and pediatrics and director of the division of general internal medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in Little Rock, AK.