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Description

Purpose: We sought to define, evaluate, and disseminate a set of essential COVID health literacy messages to help community members wisely navigate COVID-19 exposures, risks, and diagnoses as COVID-19 enters its endemic phase.

Design Methods: Key Informant interviews with medical professionals and Focus Groups (FG) with community members identified critical COVID-19 health education areas. Evidence-based initial messages were developed for each educational area. Another round of community member FGs evaluated the messages for relevance, value, and clarity. Community surveys are being deployed to gauge broad knowledge of the messages prior to implementation of a tailored dissemination campaign.

Results/Expected Results: The expert (n = 8) and community consultation (5 FG, n = 18 participants) identified seven themes, including  34 simple messages about COVID’s continued spread (2), severe disease risk (3 major messages and 7 sub-messages), caring for self and others (4), mitigating virus spread (4), long COVID (3), vaccination (1), handling a COVID exposure (6), and dealing with a COVID diagnosis (4). Survey deployment ascertains the level of agreement by community members with each of the messages, to identify which themes and messages will become the focus of a subsequent educational campaign.

FG participants demonstrated varied levels of experience and concern with COVID. Items of special interest for dissemination were information related to Long COVID and available treatments for people with COVID. There was a high level of skepticism regarding COVID vaccination. Overall, FG participants agreed that the messages identified were important and should be disseminated.

Discussion/Conclusion: As COVID becomes endemic, it is necessary to promote an essential level of health literacy related to COVID risks, prevention, and the management of exposure as well as of a documented infection. Through consultation with expert informants and community members, we have identified elemental messages that may be helpful in such an endeavor.

Grant Support: Research reported in this NIH Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number 6922-03-COVID-S002. Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Publication Date

2024

City

Mobile

Keywords

community engagement, COVID-19

Comments

This poster was presented 10 2024 at the 17th Health Disparities Conference at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, LA. 

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Developing a Community Engaged COVID-19 Education Campaign

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