Planning and Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccine Outreach and Communications

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Background

COVID-19 vaccination may be off to a slow start, but soon supply levels will rise and processes will be streamlined. Thoughtfully designed outreach with well-crafted messages will be of the utmost importance to ensure enough people are vaccinated to put us on the path to population immunity and long-term protection from the disease. As decision-makers plan and implement vaccination campaigns, understanding the COVID-19 relative mortality risks and potential barriers to vaccine uptake by ZIP code will be valuable in building effective communication and outreach plans in each community. 

With this in mind, leaders of the UW Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program (NHP) partnered with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) and researchers at the UW Health Innovation Program (HIP) to develop a tool that will help community-level decision makers prioritize their COVID-19 vaccination outreach in Wisconsin communities. The tool, available at https://nhp.wisc.edu/covid-19/, estimates the relative risk of COVID-19 mortality and potential barriers to COVID-19 vaccination in many Wisconsin ZIP codes.

Who should use this toolkit?

This toolkit is intended for healthcare administrators, clinicians, and policymakers.

What does the toolkit contain?

The Planning and Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccine Outreach and Communications tool contains a video and PowerPoint slides about using local data to plan and prioritize covid-19 vaccine outreach and communications in Wisconsin communities.

How should these tools be used?

The materials in this toolkit can be used to: 
  1. Understand COVID-19 mortality risks in the communities you serve
  2. Anticipate potential barriers to vaccination in the communities you serve 
  3. Build a targeted COVID-19 outreach and communication plan in the communities you serve
Additionally, to allow you to easily adapt the instruments for use in your organization, they are provided as separate files that you can download on the HIPxChange site. 

Development of this toolkit

The Planning and Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccine Outreach and Communications toolkit was developed by researchers and clinicians (Principal Investigator: Maureen Smith) at the UW Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program.
 
This project was supported by the Wisconsin Partnership Program. Additional support was provided by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health’s Health Innovation Program (HIP), the Wisconsin Partnership Program, and the Community-Academic Partnerships core of the University of Wisconsin Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (UW ICTR), grant 9 U54 TR000021 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (previously grant 1 UL1 RR025011 from the National Center for Research Resources). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or other funders.

Please send questions, comments and suggestions to HIPxChange@hip.wisc.edu

Toolkit Citation

We suggest using the following citation for this toolkit: Bonham-Werling J. Planning and Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccine Outreach and Communications. UW Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program. Madison, WI; 2021. Available at http://www.hipxchange.org/COVID-19VaccineOutreach.

About the Authors

Jessica Bonham-Werling, MBA, was the Director of the Neighborhood Health Partnerships Program and the Associate Director of Research Operations at the Health Innovation Program within the University of Wisconsin. Throughout her career, Jessica has worked to drive health equity, expand access and improve health care experiences with collaborative program design, robust planning and thoughtful implementation. Prior to her roles at the University of Wisconsin, Jessica led efforts to optimize the consumer experience at Kaiser Permanente and spent 7 years leading public sector and healthcare clients through large scale people, process and technology changes at Deloitte Consulting. Jessica has a Masters in Business Administration with a focus in healthcare operations from the University of California, Los Angeles.