Recommendations on Public and Professional Awareness of HPV

  • By 2025 all European country cancer plans should include actions to increase public, patient and healthcare professional understanding and awareness about HPV. This awareness should include the range of related cancers and diseases, their symptoms and forms of prevention. Furthermore, this communication effort should elaborate to the public, patients and healthcare professionals the potential and need for HPV elimination, the strategies being pursued to achieve that goal, and the role of the public, patients and healthcare professionals. Awareness levels of the public, patients and healthcare professionals on HPV should be thereafter be monitored and reported on.

  •  These awareness raising actions should encompass the dental workforce, the schooling system, community pharmacists and nurses as well as physicians in primary and secondary care.

  •  By 2021, cancer societies, patient and healthcare professional associations, and other stakeholders, should publish a core list of consensus recommendations for European member states to implement in order to combat the impacts on HPV vaccination uptake posed by fake news.

  • By 2021, all major social media platforms operating in Europe should have developed and implemented effective strategies that build on already-implemented measures to reduce significantly further the spread of fake news on vaccination.

  • By the end of 2022, all national cancer plans in Europe should include actions to combat the deterrence effects of fake news upon HPV vaccination rates, as part of a broader campaign to reduce the negative impact of fake news on all vaccination programmes.