India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare website has a section on COVID-19 awareness materials that cover multiple topics. These topics include: social distancing, mask wearing, hand washing, and dos/donts. The materials are available in English and Hindi.
Source: India MoHFW COVID Awareness Materials
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This Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) Guide serves as a guide for community health workers (CHWs), volunteers, and social mobilizers in communicating with people on COVID-19 and helping them protect themselves and others from the virus. This guide contains importance of community engagement during health crisis, how to talk to people in the community, how to protect yourself and others while on duty, and key messages that need to be conveyed to the community and to specific audience groups.
Using the guide, Department of Health, in partnership with USAID Breakthrough ACTION, UNICEF, and WHO conducted RCCE online trainings via Zoom to CHWs, volunteers, and social mobilizers.
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This Guide was developed by the Yale Institute of Global Health and the UNICEF Demand for Immunization team. It is intended for public health professionals, communicators, advocates and anyone else who wishes to create pro-vaccine content to motivate people to vaccinate themselves and their entourage.
An increasing body of formative research has identified a complex mix of determinants of people’s vaccine decisions, however there remains a paucity of implementation research that has applied these insights to the design and testing of messaging interventions.
Every recommendation herein is based on the current evidence, but the authors encourage users to test all content for behavior-related outcomes.
Source: Vaccine Messaging Guide
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This document was created to facilitate the preparation of a risk communication and community engagement strategy for vaccination against COVID-19.
Its goal is to help to strengthen the communication and planning capacities of the ministries or secretariats of health and other agencies in charge of communicating about new COVID-19 vaccines in the Americas.
It also includes a matrix for the preparation of a risk communication strategy for COVID-19 vaccines.
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This paper seeks to assess the quality and validity of information available on YouTube, based on the current Center for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.
The authors identified the 250 most-viewed videos from 1 January 2020 to 12 May 2020 on YouTube using keyword ‘COVID 19’. Two independent reviewers analyzed the English-language videos as useful, misleading, or news updates.
After excluding non-English and irrelevant videos, 100 videos were analyzed. The conclusion in the article is that YouTube is an increasingly important source of medical information during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the videos were useful, however due to the public nature of the platform, misleading information may also be easily disseminated. Independent users are more likely to post-misleading videos.
Source: YouTube as a Source of Information on the COVID-19 Pandemic
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This is a position paper that presents observations relating to policy and practice in communication in healthcare related to COVID-19. The authors state that communication in healthcare and COVID-19 have a mutually influential relationship that is informed by policy and has influenced practice. The fast pace at which policies have been developed for and practice has adapted to COVID-19 necessitates critical reflection.
Evidence-based guidance for communication in healthcare in COVID-19 is central to shaping approaches to public health communication. Evidence-based guidance is also necessary for the challenges faced in communicating with patients, their families, and carers during COVID-19.
This paper provides a summary of the key areas for development in communication in healthcare during COVID-19. It offers recommendations for improvement and a call to review policies and practice to build resilience and inclusive and equitable responsiveness in communication in healthcare.
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The Royal College of Physicians is urging people not to share and “copycat” “dangerous” videos claiming steam inhalation can prevent Covid-19. The BBC has found that alternative coronavirus treatments are being sent on chat apps like WhatsApp, as well as being widely available on social media.
BBC reporter Sima Kotecha has tracked the origins of one of these false videos to the state of Gujarat in India.
Source: Fake Covid Videos ‘Will Cost Lives’
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The shift presented in this strategy is to move from the directive, one-way communication, which characterized the early stages of the COVID-19 response, towards the community engagement and participatory approaches that have been proven to help control and eliminate outbreaks in the past.
Source: COVID-19 Global Risk Communication and Community Engagement Strategy
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Listening to people’s questions and concerns is an important way for health authorities to learn about what matters to communities in response to COVID-19. This social listening platform aims to show real time information about how people are talking about COVID-19 online, so that health professionals can better manage as the infodemic and pandemic evolve.
Source: Early AI-supported Response with Social Listening
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When deciding whether to get vaccines in general, Americans are highly concerned about side effects. Indeed, this concern is one of the most common reasons people report for delaying or refusing vaccination. Even minor side effects, such as swelling and pain at injection sites, often deter people from vaccination.
This is especially true of parents, who are loath to inflict pain on their children. For the COVID-19 vaccine in particular, fear of side effects is, according to a poll in September 2020, the most common reported reason for potential refusal.
This article points out that looking at this issue from the lens of behavioral science will aid in understanding how to tackle the problem.
Source: Misunderstanding Vaccine Side Effects Poses a Problem for Uptake
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This website is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Breakthrough ACTION Cooperative Agreement #AID-OAA-A-17-00017. Breakthrough ACTION is based at Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP).The contents of this website are the sole responsibility of Breakthrough ACTION and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID, the United States Government, or Johns Hopkins University.
