Dr Ana Slavec, InnoRenew CoE researcher and consulting statistician, and colleagues from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Computer and Information Science at the University of Ljubljana and the Institute for Economic Research prepared an article unveiling attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccination in Slovenia.

This topic is important as countries around the word are now in the phase of vaccinating their populations. Hesitancy towards vaccines has been around for years; however, this has become a serious problem for efforts to resolve the COVID-19 pandemic.

“With an online survey conducted in Slovenia, we confirmed results of previous studies on COVID-19 vaccination attitudes that respondents who are male, older, those who trust experts and vaccines, those who previously got influenza vaccination and those who knew someone who had gotten hospitalized or died, are more likely to get vaccinated,” said Dr Slavec.

“In addition, by achieving a large sample size we were able to compare attitudes of different groups of health-care professionals. We found that doctors and students of medicine have a higher intention to get vaccinated compared to nurses and other healthcare professions whose intent is even lower than the general public.”

Their article, “Factors Affecting Attitudes towards COVID-19 Vaccination: An Online Survey in Slovenia”, was published in Vaccines, an international, peer-reviewed and open access journal.