Summer may have just started, but doctors say now is the time to get children vaccinated for back-to-school in the fall. Appointments are already filling up.
The Virginia Department of Health has a full list of immunizations required for school or daycare enrollment. Dr. Ryan Fulton, section chief of Carilion Children’s Outpatient Pediatric Medicine, emphasizes the importance of yearly checkups to ensure children stay up to date on their vaccines.
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“Right now is the perfect time to ensure that your kids have all the paperwork and vaccines required to start the new school year off right,” Fulton said. “It’s very important that we don’t put it off till the very end because, as we see every year, we have a rush in August to get all the paperwork done. We don’t want anybody to have to go through all that with the stress of starting school.”
If a child has missed one or a couple of shots, now is the perfect time to get caught up. Pediatricians can create a schedule to help children get back on track. He said taking care of vaccines now is crucial in order to prevent delays in starting school.
“Trying to get your child into the pediatrician now is very important. There’s paperwork and vaccine records that have to get to the schools and not every year a child requires it but most years do and so if we wait until August and your child can’t start school because they don’t have paperwork, then it can delay certain integration into school. So if you take folks that are starting kindergarten, it’s a very anxious time of year for those five-year-olds. It’s very anxiety-provoking for their parents to send them off to a new school and be away from them for so long. The one thing we don’t want is more stress for those parents. So getting into your pediatrician as early as possible and trying to get those visits underway and the paperwork done so that box can be checked and so those first days of school can be established early."
Dr. Fulton said the type of vaccines a child will need depends on their age.
“Starting school, obviously, you want to make sure that you get your kindergarten vaccines, which are typically boosters for measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, as well as varicella. So that’s for starting kindergarten. And then we also have vaccines for going into middle school, which are your meningitis vaccines.”
Parents can schedule their child’s annual checkup today.
To see the full list of immunizations required for your child, visit VDH’s website here.
Dr. Fulton said if parents have concerns or questions about vaccines, talk to your primary care doctor.
“So the biggest thing that we want to encourage folks to do is come to your primary care doctor, talk about the vaccines that are required because really those conversations really need to happen with your doctor rather than on social."