Try of Health announced a policy of either influenza get AICA Riboside Vaccination or wearing a mask during influenza season as a 5-BrdU web condition of service for HCWs [13]. Elsewhere in Canada, Horizon Health Network, one of the two health authorities in New Brunswick, implemented a similar policy in 2012, as did 13 Ontario hospitals in 2013 and 12 Toronto-area academic hospitals in 2014 [14], and the province of Saskatchewan in September 2014[15]. The policies in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan have not been legally challenged and are still in place. However, the bmjopen-2015-010112 provincewide BC condition of service policy was controversial among HCWs and resulted in a legal challenge by the nursing union. The policy was upheld in arbitration in October 2013[16]. Given the media attention around the BC policy (S1 Table), it is important to understand the perceptions of the PNPP msds general public towards influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs. This is because online comments may influence the opinions of other content consumers–including HCWs–through the effects of exemplification [17?0], and may subsequently erode confidence in vaccines in general. We chose to focus on the comment sections of online newspapers since nearly 75 of Canadians read a newspaper each week, of which 42 read online content [21]. The advantages of analyzing perception data derived from social media are that they are readily available and can be drawn from a large geographic area [22]. Readers posting on major news sites may be more honest about their opinions since a certain degree of anonymity can be maintained. In addition, compared to other forms of social media such as Twitter, users can post more detailed opinions without restriction on the number of characters.PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,2 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare WorkersThe disadvantages include the fact that the population of online commenter do not necessarily reflect the general population, or HCWs, and that more negative voices tend to be more vocal online [23]. To understand Canadians’ perceptions of the seasonal influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs, we evaluated readers’ responses to online newspaper articles after the BC policy was announced but before it was upheld in arbitration [16].Methods Data sourcesWe searched four national and 82 local (BC) Canadian online English language news sites for news articles about mandatory influenza vaccination policies for HCWs (Fig 1). jir.2014.0227 We focused on BC, given that the condition of service policy was introduced province-wide for the 2012?Fig 1. Search strategy and inclusion criteria. An initial search returned 143 articles from which we filtered down to 36 articles containing 1163 comments. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993.gPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,3 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare Workersinfluenza season, and therefore the majority of press coverage would be from that province. We used an online newspaper database to identify BC news sites [24]. We considered English news articles posted between when the policy was announced by the Provincial Health Leupeptin (hemisulfate) chemical information Officer, on August 23, 2012, and the last day before our analysis began, on May 31, 2013, inclusive. We only considered English language articles since the Francophone community in BC is very small and the topic was not covered by newspapers in Quebec. Articles were included if they contained the wo.Try of Health announced a policy of either influenza vaccination or wearing a mask during influenza season as a condition of service for HCWs [13]. Elsewhere in Canada, Horizon Health Network, one of the two health authorities in New Brunswick, implemented a similar policy in 2012, as did 13 Ontario hospitals in 2013 and 12 Toronto-area academic hospitals in 2014 [14], and the province of Saskatchewan in September 2014[15]. The policies in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan have not been legally challenged and are still in place. However, the bmjopen-2015-010112 provincewide BC condition of service policy was controversial among HCWs and resulted in a legal challenge by the nursing union. The policy was upheld in arbitration in October 2013[16]. Given the media attention around the BC policy (S1 Table), it is important to understand the perceptions of the general public towards influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs. This is because online comments may influence the opinions of other content consumers–including HCWs–through the effects of exemplification [17?0], and may subsequently erode confidence in vaccines in general. We chose to focus on the comment sections of online newspapers since nearly 75 of Canadians read a newspaper each week, of which 42 read online content [21]. The advantages of analyzing perception data derived from social media are that they are readily available and can be drawn from a large geographic area [22]. Readers posting on major news sites may be more honest about their opinions since a certain degree of anonymity can be maintained. In addition, compared to other forms of social media such as Twitter, users can post more detailed opinions without restriction on the number of characters.PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,2 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare WorkersThe disadvantages include the fact that the population of online commenter do not necessarily reflect the general population, or HCWs, and that more negative voices tend to be more vocal online [23]. To understand Canadians’ perceptions of the seasonal influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs, we evaluated readers’ responses to online newspaper articles after the BC policy was announced but before it was upheld in arbitration [16].Methods Data sourcesWe searched four national and 82 local (BC) Canadian online English language news sites for news articles about mandatory influenza vaccination policies for HCWs (Fig 1). jir.2014.0227 We focused on BC, given that the condition of service policy was introduced province-wide for the 2012?Fig 1. Search strategy and inclusion criteria. An initial search returned 143 articles from which we filtered down to 36 articles containing 1163 comments. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993.gPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,3 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare Workersinfluenza season, and therefore the majority of press coverage would be from that province. We used an online newspaper database to identify BC news sites [24]. We considered English news articles posted between when the policy was announced by the Provincial Health Officer, on August 23, 2012, and the last day before our analysis began, on May 31, 2013, inclusive. We only considered English language articles since the Francophone community in BC is very small and the topic was not covered by newspapers in Quebec. Articles were included if they contained the wo.Try of Health announced a policy of either influenza vaccination or wearing a mask during influenza season as a condition of service for HCWs [13]. Elsewhere in Canada, Horizon Health Network, one of the two health authorities in New Brunswick, implemented a similar policy in 2012, as did 13 Ontario hospitals in 2013 and 12 Toronto-area academic hospitals in 2014 [14], and the province of Saskatchewan in September 2014[15]. The policies in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan have not been legally challenged and are still in place. However, the bmjopen-2015-010112 provincewide BC condition of service policy was controversial among HCWs and resulted in a legal challenge by the nursing union. The policy was upheld in arbitration in October 2013[16]. Given the media attention around the BC policy (S1 Table), it is important to understand the perceptions of the general public towards influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs. This is because online comments may influence the opinions of other content consumers–including HCWs–through the effects of exemplification [17?0], and may subsequently erode confidence in vaccines in general. We chose to focus on the comment sections of online newspapers since nearly 75 of Canadians read a newspaper each week, of which 42 read online content [21]. The advantages of analyzing perception data derived from social media are that they are readily available and can be drawn from a large geographic area [22]. Readers posting on major news sites may be more honest about their opinions since a certain degree of anonymity can be maintained. In addition, compared to other forms of social media such as Twitter, users can post more detailed opinions without restriction on the number of characters.PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,2 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare WorkersThe disadvantages include the fact that the population of online commenter do not necessarily reflect the general population, or HCWs, and that more negative voices tend to be more vocal online [23]. To understand Canadians’ perceptions of the seasonal influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs, we evaluated readers’ responses to online newspaper articles after the BC policy was announced but before it was upheld in arbitration [16].Methods Data sourcesWe searched four national and 82 local (BC) Canadian online English language news sites for news articles about mandatory influenza vaccination policies for HCWs (Fig 1). jir.2014.0227 We focused on BC, given that the condition of service policy was introduced province-wide for the 2012?Fig 1. Search strategy and inclusion criteria. An initial search returned 143 articles from which we filtered down to 36 articles containing 1163 comments. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993.gPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,3 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare Workersinfluenza season, and therefore the majority of press coverage would be from that province. We used an online newspaper database to identify BC news sites [24]. We considered English news articles posted between when the policy was announced by the Provincial Health Officer, on August 23, 2012, and the last day before our analysis began, on May 31, 2013, inclusive. We only considered English language articles since the Francophone community in BC is very small and the topic was not covered by newspapers in Quebec. Articles were included if they contained the wo.Try of Health announced a policy of either influenza vaccination or wearing a mask during influenza season as a condition of service for HCWs [13]. Elsewhere in Canada, Horizon Health Network, one of the two health authorities in New Brunswick, implemented a similar policy in 2012, as did 13 Ontario hospitals in 2013 and 12 Toronto-area academic hospitals in 2014 [14], and the province of Saskatchewan in September 2014[15]. The policies in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan have not been legally challenged and are still in place. However, the bmjopen-2015-010112 provincewide BC condition of service policy was controversial among HCWs and resulted in a legal challenge by the nursing union. The policy was upheld in arbitration in October 2013[16]. Given the media attention around the BC policy (S1 Table), it is important to understand the perceptions of the general public towards influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs. This is because online comments may influence the opinions of other content consumers–including HCWs–through the effects of exemplification [17?0], and may subsequently erode confidence in vaccines in general. We chose to focus on the comment sections of online newspapers since nearly 75 of Canadians read a newspaper each week, of which 42 read online content [21]. The advantages of analyzing perception data derived from social media are that they are readily available and can be drawn from a large geographic area [22]. Readers posting on major news sites may be more honest about their opinions since a certain degree of anonymity can be maintained. In addition, compared to other forms of social media such as Twitter, users can post more detailed opinions without restriction on the number of characters.PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,2 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare WorkersThe disadvantages include the fact that the population of online commenter do not necessarily reflect the general population, or HCWs, and that more negative voices tend to be more vocal online [23]. To understand Canadians’ perceptions of the seasonal influenza vaccination as a condition of service for HCWs, we evaluated readers’ responses to online newspaper articles after the BC policy was announced but before it was upheld in arbitration [16].Methods Data sourcesWe searched four national and 82 local (BC) Canadian online English language news sites for news articles about mandatory influenza vaccination policies for HCWs (Fig 1). jir.2014.0227 We focused on BC, given that the condition of service policy was introduced province-wide for the 2012?Fig 1. Search strategy and inclusion criteria. An initial search returned 143 articles from which we filtered down to 36 articles containing 1163 comments. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993.gPLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129993 June 18,3 /Perceptions of Mandatory Influenza Vaccination of Healthcare Workersinfluenza season, and therefore the majority of press coverage would be from that province. We used an online newspaper database to identify BC news sites [24]. We considered English news articles posted between when the policy was announced by the Provincial Health Officer, on August 23, 2012, and the last day before our analysis began, on May 31, 2013, inclusive. We only considered English language articles since the Francophone community in BC is very small and the topic was not covered by newspapers in Quebec. Articles were included if they contained the wo.
