Dr Jana Pittman explains why childhood immunisations are important

Dr Jana Pittman is a former Australian Olympic athlete and is now a women’s health doctor. As a busy mum of 6 children, Jana tells us how she protects her kids from vaccine-preventable disease with childhood immunisations from the perspective of a mother and a medical professional.

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My name's Jana Pittman.

I'm a mother of six beautiful children.

I'm now a doctor in Women's Health and I was an Olympic athlete for Australia.

I think it's really hard to know what to expect as a parent when you're vaccinating your child, particularly if it's your first child.

For me, I'm lucky I have that information, but I didn't always have that.

Certainly the first couple of children I had, I was not a doctor, I had no medical information.

I had a very reactive child who, you know, would touch grass and, and, and go bright red.

And so certainly for immunisations, I'd worry that he'd get sick, that he'd get a reaction in the arm.

Certainly with my nurse, when I went in and talked about my concerns, she said yes, that's true.

He might get sick in the tummy, yes, he might get a rash, yes, he might get a fever and reassured me that my feelings around that were not wrong, but the information was there to quieten down my nerves once I was a doctor.

You see it firsthand, which makes it very real.

It's hard to vaccinate against something that you've not seen.

You know, when we have eradicated most of the really preventable diseases in Australia, it's really hard to think, well, why am I giving this to my child when it doesn't exist as much?

You know, I haven't seen a child sick from that illness, but that's because we do the vaccination program.

I unfortunately had a friend who lost their little one through whooping cough and after that I made a public decision that as a well-known Australian that I wanted to advocate for information, for awareness.

As a mum, I know you can sometimes be nervous around immunisations, but I think in Australia we need to be part of the solution.

And childhood vaccination comes down to creating a herd immunity in the whole environment, in your community of friends and your family and Australia as a whole.

And ensure that you're part of that collective response to make sure that all the children that can't have vaccinations will be protected as well.

I think trying to remember vaccination dates is incredibly hard, but the awareness is to know that it has to happen.

So as a mum of six, obviously I had lots of children having vaccinations at different times.

I could never keep up with the schedule, but I just made sure I knew about my GP, my community nurse.

And making sure you book that appointment around the time then you know it's due is all that you can do as a mum.

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