The COVID-19 vaccine is being rolled out globally. High and ongoing public uptake of the vaccine relies on health and social care professionals having the knowledge and confidence to actively and effectively advocate it. An internationally relevant, interactive multimedia training resource called COVID-19 Vaccine Education (CoVE) was developed using ASPIRE methodology. This rigorous six-step process included: (1) establishing the aims, (2) storyboarding and co-design, (3) populating and producing, (4) implementation, (5) release, and (6) mixed-methods evaluation aligned with the New World Kirkpatrick Model. Two synchronous consultations with members of the target audience identified the support need and established the key aim (Step 1: 2 groups: n = 48). Asynchronous storyboarding was used to co-construct the content, ordering, presentation, and interactive elements (Step 2: n = 14). Iterative two-stage peer review was undertaken of content and technical presentation (Step 3: n = 23). The final resource was released in June 2021 (Step 4: >3653 views). Evaluation with health and social care professionals from 26 countries (survey, n = 162; qualitative interviews, n = 15) established that CoVE has high satisfaction, usability, and relevance to the target audience. Engagement with CoVE increased participants’ knowledge and confidence relating to vaccine promotion and facilitated vaccine-promoting behaviours and vaccine uptake. The CoVE digital training package is open access and provides a valuable mechanism for supporting health and care professionals in promoting COVID-19 vaccination uptake.
Citation:
Blake, H.; Fecowycz, A.; Starbuck, H.; Jones, W. COVID-19 Vaccine Education (CoVE) for Health and Care Workers to Facilitate Global Promotion of the COVID-19 Vaccines. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 653. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19020653
Since COVID-19 and its associated vaccine only emerged very recently, healthcare curricula have not previously incorporated education on this subject and so the subject area is relatively new for many healthcare professionals and healthcare trainees who are not trained COVID-19 vaccinators. Healthcare professionals, healthcare educators, and healthcare trainees hold positive attitudes towards online learning and digital approaches to learning are now mainstreaming in health education. Advantages of online learning include flexibility, self-pacing, catering to different learning styles and reducing resource costs associated with time, travel, and trainer availability. With the urgency of COVID-19 vaccine (including booster vaccine) rollout globally, the overall aim of this study was to rapidly develop and test an internationally relevant, multimedia e-learning package providing education about the COVID-19 vaccine for health and care workers (and trainees), in order to facilitate global promotion and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The research question was: Does this digital training package improve users’ knowledge and confidence for promoting the COVID-19 vaccine and/or lead to changes in behaviour around vaccine promotion?
Our evaluation showed that the COVID-19 Vaccine Education (CoVE) training package increases users’ knowledge and confidence in communicating with patients, clients and the general public about the importance of the COVID-19 vaccine for individual and societal health. CoVE is internationally relevant, and timely for distribution to health and care professionals and healthcare trainees during the COVID-19 pandemic. We recommend that healthcare organisations and educational facilities widely distribute CoVE to facilitate global promotion and uptake of the COVID-19 vaccines. While CoVE has shown to be globally relevant and provides a wealth of additional evidence-based resources, in certain contexts the training could be delivered alongside additional materials that are tailored to the concerns of motivations of specific cultural groups, or the package could be distributed by trusted members of community groups. The package content has high value at the time of this study but will need to be periodically reviewed and updated. This is because the pandemic’s trajectory (and the response to it) will evolve, vaccines will be more widely distributed, the extended period of media coverage may raise additional questions, and post-vaccination surveillance data will provide greater insights over time.
The CoVE package is open access on HELM Open: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/helmopen/rlos/practice-learning/public-health/CoVE/ (accessed on 17 December 2021).
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/ijerph19020653