Community Engagement

Over the last few years, we have learnt a lot about what works and what doesn’t work in promoting public health messages. For example, we have learnt that good community engagement is key to ensuring successful vaccine campaigns.

But what is good community engagement?  It’s not simply a method to get more ‘jabs in arms’, it’s a ‘driver for health equity’ (WHO 2019*) and so should be embedded within all our public health programmes. Ideally whether its designing, delivering or evaluating interventions, we should be building-in community engagement and meaningful participation right from the start.

*WHO (2019) Participation as a driver of health equity

Vaccine Engagement Sector Led Improvement (SLI) Project

As part of ADPH’s commitment to improve public health practice, we talked to London’s Local Authority Public Health and Communications teams about their collective Covid-19 vaccine engagement experiences. We hosted a workshop and asked them to share the challenges faced and successes achieved throughout the pandemic in engaging with communities to increase vaccine uptake.

We did a deep dive into the experiences of four local authorities. We developed case studies which illustrate their engagement journeys which look at inclusion health, vaccine hesitancy, understanding local contexts and improving accessibility.

The project identified key learning that could be applied to future vaccine programmes beyond COVID-19, creating a checklist for engagement for population-based public health campaigns.

This project was funded by NHSE via ADPH UK. Special thanks to all those who contributed.