/Covid-19-Health-Equity-Resources

Resources that target health equity and accessibility during Covid-19

Creative Commons Zero v1.0 UniversalCC0-1.0

Covid-19 Health Equity: Communications and Educational Resources

This is a list of resources, templates, tools, and health communication best practices from various states and counties in the United States to improve health equity and accessibility during Covid-19 vaccine rollout.

Our goals are to:

  1. Help communications teams, diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, and health equity task force access evidence-based communication materials.

  2. Empower local and state communication and public health officials work together to collaborate on these tools, templates, and best practices to support their counties and state in the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines.

  3. Identify common best practices to localize health education and communication to best serve residents. How do you ensure

If you know of a communication best practice, materials, tool, or templates that are not listed or have built one yourself, please file a PR to add it to the list!

Terms in Equity

  • Health coaches: a team of community “health coaches” who build trust and better communication between health professionals and patients.
  • Trust messengers: individuals in the community that build relationships with their communities and have high influence in their network such as religious leaders from rabbis, pastors, and imams.

Evidence-based Tactics for Equitable Vaccine Distribution

  • Advocate to include inequities in the data to include ethnicity and race. This is arguably the most important to target community-level support based on high-risk population groups.
  • Require transparency when it comes to reviewing safety and efficacy data, with approval discussions taking place in the public eye, particularly in the event of an Emergency Use Authorization.
  • Engage state-level task forces and working groups in discussions about how to distribute vaccines effectively to recommended populations, with a focus on communication strategies and ensuring proper representation of minority voices.
  • Create Covid-19 infodemics. Infodemiology is the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium to inform public health and public policy in short nuggets to combat anti-public health groups, vaccine hesitancy, and misinformation.
  • [Lessons learned from HPV vaccine] Update campaign materials and platforms to provide more robust sources of information to parents. Vaccine messaging should directly mention benefits of the vaccine, address safety and effectiveness concerns with some data, and mention age address the broader 9-15 age range.
  • [Lessons learned from parental vaccine influence] Highlight trust in healthcare providers and communicate norms in familiar format in communication campaigns. Don’t correct misinformation or focus heavily on risks of illness (Sources: Pentaa & Baban, 2018, Corben & Leask, 2016).