Coordinating Care and Timelines for Travel Vaccines

An expert discusses how, when a patient requires a travel vaccine not readily available at the community pharmacy (eg, yellow fever, high-dose rabies), pharmacists utilize formal referral pathways and communication procedures to ensure timely patient access, according to Jeffery Goad, PharmD, MPH, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. These pathways typically involve referring the patient to a specialized travel clinic or a health care provider known to stock the necessary vaccine. The most critical step is ensuring the vaccination record is securely transferred back to the originating pharmacy profile. This is often accomplished through faxed documentation, secure electronic health record integration, or a clear instruction to the patient to return the documentation, allowing the pharmacy to maintain a complete, centralized immunization record for the patient.

Pharmacies must take proactive steps to ensure patients receive travel vaccines with adequate time for the vaccine to become effective before their departure. This requires early patient engagement and thorough scheduling. Pharmacists encourage patients to schedule a pretravel consultation 6 weeks before travel to allow for the completion of a multidose series and proper development of the immune response.

Scheduling optimization is performed by using the patient’s departure date as a firm deadline to schedule all required doses backward. For patients requesting vaccines near their departure, the pharmacist must conduct a rapid risk assessment and provide clear counseling. The focus shifts to administering any doses possible (even if suboptimally timed) that will provide some level of protection and clearly managing the patient’s expectations regarding the vaccine’s limited efficacy by the departure date.