Hold them for the needles
The needle is two minutes. Missing the window is months of risk you cannot hug away.
Immunisation is how serious infections are kept off your child, and how they are kept from moving through everyone else. Herd immunity is the plain version. Enough people protected, and the spread slows or stops, which covers the baby who is too young or too sick to be vaccinated yet.
Some of these diseases are uncommon in Australia now because the program ran for years. They are not gone from the planet. Stop the program and they return.
That is the argument. Not a Facebook thread.
The National Immunisation Program recommends and funds shots against 13 diseases for children from birth to 4 years, and a flu vaccine each year from 6 months up to 5 years. To be properly covered, some diseases need repeats. One visit is not the set.
At birth, one injection, hepatitis B. If you are at the hospital, you can ask what it was and when the next one is. Do not assume it happened because the day was chaos.
At 6 to 8 weeks there are three. An injection for hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Hib and polio. An injection for pneumococcal disease.
Rotavirus as a liquid they swallow, and that dose has a clock. It must be given at 6 to 14 weeks. Miss the rotavirus window and you do not get a casual makeup slot.
Put it in the calendar the week you come home.
At 4 months, the same three again. Rotavirus this time must land between 10 and 24 weeks. At 6 months, one injection covering hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Hib and polio.
At 12 months, three injections. One is meningococcal ACWY. One is measles, mumps and rubella.
I am not going to invent the third from memory if the paragraph in front of me names two and says three. Ask the nurse what the third is on the day, and write it down. The point of this toolkit is the visits you can already name.
Your body is useful in the room. Hold them. Talk.
Let them cry. A feed after, if that is the plan. Paracetamol only if you were told to use it, at the dose you were told, not as a ritual you copied.
Watch them that evening. A lot of babies are grotty and hot at the site. Fever in a baby under three months is still the fever rule from the other page.
If you are worried, call.
Book the next appointment before you leave the clinic. Future you, with a teething baby and a work deadline, will not remember 4 months. The blue book, or whatever your state calls the record, stays in the bag. You can be the parent who knows the date.
Source: Raising Children Network