“General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization”—Everything CDC Wants You to Know about the Practical Aspects of Vaccination

On April 20, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released “General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization: Best Practices Guidance of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)” as an online only publication. It is also accessible in HTML format. This new guidance document replaces ACIP’s General Recommendations on Immunization, which was last published in 2011 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

“General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization” goes deep into the “how-to” issues of providing vaccination services, with much more detailed information than is available in the vaccine-specific recommendations published by ACIP.

The updated ACIP guidance is intended to help vaccination providers become adept at multiple aspects of vaccine delivery, and includes chapters/sections on the following:

• Timing and Spacing of Vaccines
• Contraindications and Precautions
• Preventing and Managing Adverse Reactions
• Vaccine Administration
• Storage and Handling of Immunobiologics
• Altered Immunocompetence
• Vaccination Records
• and much more

By releasing “General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization” as an online-only publication, CDC will be able to update the guidance more quickly, giving vaccination providers the most up-to-date information on vaccination practice issues.

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Continuing education (CE) credit is available for reading “General Best Practice Guidelines for Immunization.”

More resources

• CDC’s ACIP recommendations web section (alphabetical index by vaccine name)
• IAC’s ACIP recommendations web section (alphabetical index by vaccine name)
• IAC’s ACIP recommendations web section (reverse chronological order)