Dr. Debra Sowell discusses Immunizations and GGC's Pediatrics Department

Graves Gilbert Clinic's Dr. Sowell talks about our pediatrics department. She discusses visits, immunizations, physicals and more!

Graves Gilbert Clinic is a multispecialty clinic located in Bowling Green, Kentucky housing more than 125 physicians, 50 physician assistants and nurse practitioners who continue to lead the way in medical innovation and technology and serve South Central Kentucky with the same level of care and dedication that their founding fathers promised over 80 years ago when Dr. Graves and Dr. Gilbert shook hands and made a commitment to the future: A commitment to a Lifetime of Care. Learn more at

Transcript of Dr. Sowell:

My name is Debra Sowell and I am the Chief of Pediatrics here at Graves Gilbert Clinic.

Well we offer obviously child visits and we basically cover from the newborn nursery all the way through quote unquote until they graduate from high school or they turn nineteen, kind of whichever is first or last.

We provide preventative services, which includes a lot of times of course immunizations and well visits and certain things that we do at all the what we call our well baby visits and then as children are older obviously school physicals, camp physicals, sports physicals, that sort of thing and then of course we provide sick care.

Another service that we offer is that we have a Developmental Pediatrician on staff who does autistic screenings. These are becoming more and more important.

Well immunizations are vitally important. We have basically three sets of vaccines that children get.

One of course are what we call a primary series and those start actually the day they're born. The first twenty-four hours they're started on Hepatitis B vaccine and then those vaccines are given, a series of vaccines are given at two, four, six, twelve, fifteen, and eighteen months of age.

Then we have the school age vaccines, which are usually given some time between four and six and then we have the sixth grade/adolescent vaccines that are out there.

Obviously the primary set are to get everything in and protect against most common causes of Bacterial Meningitis, to protect against Whooping Cough, which we still had an outbreak of Whooping Cough within the last few years up in Edmonson County.

I always tell parents, this isn't something that happened in California, this happened in Edmonson County.

We want to have our babies protected against that.

At the school age, those are just booster shots at the four to six age group. They're vaccines they've already had, so we're boosting up against actually Polio, DPT, so Diphtheria, Tetanus, and most importantly the P part of the Whooping Cough.

They get an MMR. Measles, Mumps, and German Measles and then they get a Chicken Pox booster at that time if they haven't had Chicken Pox the disease.

Then at the sixth grade, we add a new vaccine, which is a Meningococcal vaccine. We get a Tetanus booster at that time with the Whooping Cough part of it and then we also get the HPV vaccines.

So basically, every set of vaccines sort of has a different importance factor.


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