Ensuring Relevance to Practice: Examining Implementation of an Influenza Vaccine Toolkit in Texas' Public Health Region 11

One hundred and fourteen Texas Vaccine for Children (TVFC) healthcare providers in Public Health Region 11 (PHR 11), Texas were sent the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) influenza toolkit by mail in May 2022. The rationale for the creation of the DSHS influenza toolkit was to provide an educational tool for healthcare providers that could bring attention to and encourage vaccines to increase influenza vaccination rates. Toolkits offer practical advice on issues to facilitate wide-spread adoption of concepts or best practices across a profession (American Library Association, n.d.) and toolkit development and distribution should include literature reviews that uncover relevant, current, evidence-based practice (EBP) that could be presented to healthcare providers in a helpful and useful way (Cifuentes, 2022; Nowalk et al., 2012). The adaptable documents of a toolkit can increase the use of evidence-based interventions and inform and aid in implementation (Thoele et al., 2020).When developing a toolkit, gathering input from the users of the toolkit is a very important activity to provide a practical and accessible toolkit, as well as identifying and eliminating barriers for the users to promote self-efficacy. There was no logic model produced for the DSHS toolkit project, so this study created a theoretical logic model that proposes elements, actions and outcomes involved in the implementation of a vaccine promotional toolkit for providers, and more specifically, an influenza toolkit. The logic model indicates that resource requirements may be multilevel, including internal to DSHS, inter-organizational and community-based.A case study using exploratory, sequential, mixed methods design in a developmental evaluation (DE) framework was used for this study. This quantitative and qualitative methods approach was used to answer the study aims of how the toolkit was used and if portions of the toolkit were adapted or modified to meet their needs.