Title

Health belief model based predictors and perceptions of COVID-19 vaccination amongst frontline health workers

Authors

Jitendra Majhi^1,*, Paramita Sengupta¹, Preetika Banerjee², Aloke Biswas¹, Kayur Mehta³, Anita Shet² & Ninad Vilas Nagrale⁴

Affiliation

¹Department of Community Medicine & Family Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Kalyani, West Bengal, India; ²International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA; ³International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA; ⁴Department of Forensic Medicine & Toxicology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Kalyani, West Bengal, India; *Corresponding author

Email

Jitendra Majhi - E-mail: drjitendrascb@gmail.com
Paramita Sengupta - E-mail: paramita.cmfm@aiimskalyani.edu.in
Preetika Banerjee - E-mail: preetikabnrj@gmail.com
Aloke Biswas - E-mail: dralokebiswas@gmail.com
Kayur Mehta - E-mail: kmehta6@jhu.edu
Anita Shet - E-mail: ashet1@jhu.edu
Ninad Vilas Nagrale - E-mail: ninad.fmt@aiimskalyani.edu.in

Article Type

Research Article

Date

Received June 1, 2025; Revised June 30, 2025; Accepted June 30, 2025, Published June 30, 2025

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic presented with a scenario wherein the healthcare delivery system was overwhelmed by unprecedented COVID morbidities. Vaccines were made available in a short span of time during the pandemic for the public that required the frontline workers especially the ASHAs to overcome their own hesitancies of the newer vaccine before convincing the community for vaccination. A cross-sectional survey on the perceptions of COVID vaccination was conducted wherein 74 ASHAs participated in the interview involving Likert scale responses on vaccine acceptance which were modelled on Health Belief Model (HBM) to find predictors of vaccine acceptance by performing ordinal regression analysis. It was seen that the domains of 'Benefit', 'Barrier' and 'Modifying Variable' appeared to increase the acceptance of the vaccine whereas the domains of 'Susceptibility' and 'Severity' had decreasing effect on acceptance, of which only 'Severity' domain significantly had a negative effect on COVID vaccine acceptance amongst the frontline workers. HBM is a useful tool which can provide information about the facilitating and negating factors of newer vaccines introduction which can be utilized by public health researchers to better understand the perceptions and accordingly vaccine introduction approaches can be modified.

Keywords

COVID-19; vaccine acceptance; health belief model; ordinal regression; Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs)

Citation

Majhi et al. Bioinformation 21(6): 1404-1415 (2025)

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.