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Objective Adolescents’ views, and preferences are often over-looked when public health policies that affect them are designed and implemented. The purpose of this study was to describe young people's views and preferences for determining government funding priorities for adolescent immunization programs. Methods In 2015 we conducted a youth jury in metropolitan Adelaide, South Australia to deliberate on the question “What criteria should we use to decide which vaccines for young people in Australia should receive public funding?” Fifteen youth aged 15–19 years participated in the jury. Jury members were recruited from the general community through a market research company using a stratified sampling technique. Results The jury's key priorities for determining publically funded vaccines were: Disease severity – whether the vaccine preventable disease (VPD) was life threatening and impacted on quality of life. Transmissibility – VPDs with high/fast transmission and high prevalence. Demonstration of cost-effectiveness, taking into account purchase price, program administration, economic and societal gain. The jury's recommendations for vaccine funding policy were strongly underpinned by the belief that it was critical to ensure that funding was targeted to not only population groups who would be medically at risk from vaccine preventable diseases, but also to socially and economically disadvantaged population groups. A novel recommendation proposed by the jury was that there should be a process for establishing criteria to remove vaccines from publically funded programs as a complement to the process for adding new vaccines. Conclusions Young people have valuable contributions to make in priority setting for health programs and their views should be incorporated into the framing of health policies that directly affect them.

Introduction: We sought community opinion on consent alternatives when linking childhood immunisation and hospital attendance records for the purpose of vaccine safety surveillance. Methods: We conducted computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) of a sample of rural and metropolitan residents of South Australia in 2011. Results: Of 2002 households interviewed (response rate 55.6%), 96.4% supported data linkage for postmarketing surveillance of vaccines; very few were completely opposed (1.5%) or undecided (2.2%). The majority (75.3%) trusted the privacy protections used in data linkage and most wished to have minimal or no direct involvement, preferring either opt-out consent (40.4%) or no consent (30.6%). A quarter of respondents (24.6%) favoured opt-in consent, but their preferences were divergent; half requested consent be sought prior to every use (11.4%) while the remainder preferred to give broad consent just once (3.4%) or renewed at periodic intervals (9.8%). Over half of the respondents gave higher priority to rapid vaccine safety surveillance (56.5%) rather than first seeking parental consent (26.6%) and one in seven was undecided (14.5%). Although 91.6% of respondents believed childhood vaccines are safe, over half (53.1%) were very or somewhat concerned that a vaccine could cause a serious reaction. Nevertheless, 92.4% of the parents in the sample (556/601) reported every child in their care as being fully immunised according to the National Immunisation Program schedule. Only 3.7% of parents (22/601) reported one or more children as under immunised, and 3.9% (23/601) reported that none of their children were immunised. Conclusions: This survey demonstrates that data linkage for vaccine safety surveillance has substantial community support and that a system utilising opt-out consent or no consent was preferred to one using opt-in consent. These findings should inform public health policy and practice; data linkage should be established where feasible to address limitations in passive surveillance systems Refereed/Peer-reviewed