Over the last few months we have been working with members from different communities in Hulme, Moss Side and Rusholme as part of the #SharingHealth4U project to create and spread health messages around the flu vaccine. In these areas, flu vaccine uptake within some ethnic minority communities had been low and local knowledge pointed to misinformation about the vaccine being a key contributor to this. Therefore, we’ve be working with people and health care professionals to develop accurate health messages to help combat any myths or ‘fake news’ that is out there.

We started in December devising scripts and text for different types of health messages. These included people’s own personal stories about taking the vaccine, healthcare professionals from the affected communities preparing ‘myth buster’ snippets and pointers as to where people can go to find out more. These messages have been recorded in different languages including Bengali, Urdu, French and Arabic and in formats including audio soundbites, short video clips and text messages. People have since been sending these messages out through their personal and professional networks on social media, messaging services and e-mailers and have been logging how effective these grassroots information sharing methods have been.

So far what we have learned is that (a) messaging services such as WhatsApp and plain text messages are having the biggest reach and (b) that the personal stories around the vaccine have been the most positively received. More so, people felt confident sharing the personal stories as they felt they had a legitimacy in sharing these, more so than the more ‘professional’ or ‘conventional’ health messages.

The whole project has been released over Zoom… which has been a little bit of an issue due to differing levels of tech skills in the group, but we are all continuing to pull together to make it work and get the word out there! We’ll report back later in the year on the results of this work and share with you some know-how and learnings on health messaging driven by communities.