COVID-19 Vaccine – Equity and Engagement – Washington State Department of Health

1. Engage communities to inform vaccine prioritization and planning

We are committed to getting feedback from communities, partners, organizations, businesses, and governmental entities throughout all stages of vaccine planning and implementation.

During the fall of 2020, DOH led a comprehensive engagement effort to get feedback from disproportionately impacted communities, partners, and sectors about how we should prioritize and allocate the COVID-19 vaccine. We conducted 90 interviews, focus groups, and community conversations with 568 individuals and surveyed about 18,000 people in multiple languages. Read the full report to learn more.

These engagement efforts directly informed our interim vaccine allocation and prioritization guidance. Some specific examples of how we integrated community input into vaccine prioritization:

We are continuing to integrate a pro-equity approach into vaccine allocation and distribution. This includes looking at all the different ways vaccine is distributed, including via health care systems, pharmacies, state run mass vaccination sites, community pop-up clinics, mobile clinics, local mass vaccination sites, and employer based vaccination sites. For each of these, there are opportunities to support equitable vaccine access by:

Providers who are best positioned to serve communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 include:

If you are a health care provider who serves communities who are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and you are interested in enrolling to offer the COVID-19 vaccine, please visit our COVID-19 Vaccine Program Enrollment page or contact covid.vaccine@doh.wa.gov for technical assistance.

The Washington State Department of Health has an obligation to ensure equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine. We recognize that community-rooted and community-led organizations and groups are better positioned and equipped to listen, understand, and respond to the needs of their community members in the most culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate way. They are also better equipped to use a trauma-informed lens or approach to their interventions so as to not perpetuate further harm, fear, and distrust that may be exacerbated by governmental entities in times of extreme crisis, like a pandemic.

In 2020,DOH and Desautel Hege launched a new community-based outreach approach to working with community media and organizations to address inequities around COVID-19. Through this program, DOH funds community media and organizations to develop communications and perform outreach to historically excluded and underrepresented audiences. The goal is to ensure priority communities receive culturally appropriate and accessible information about COVID-19 vaccines, prevention, and safe re-opening.

Based on population health data, risk and vaccination, priority communities are identified where additional mile-deep communications can help improve health outcomes. Mile deep (as opposed to mile-wide) communications are defined as activities that go beyond traditional advertising and public education to connect deeply with a community through trusted message carriers, culturally informed communications and outreach in a way that considers access, social determinants of health, systemic racism, and historical trauma.

Community Driven Messaging Contracts

Since the fall of 2020, we have partnered with DH to support direct investments in community/ethnic media outlets and community based organizations for community-driven messaging efforts.

Community Outreach Services Contracts

Between January and April of 2021, the project contracted with 48 partners 27 paid media vendors and 21 community-based organizations.

In March 2021 the project conducted a second round of outreach to additional partners to expand the project's reach to more communities to support vaccination and prevention messaging. The second phase of implementation has expanded to 122 partners 34 paid media vendors and 88 community-based organizations.

Additionally, Washington state has the All in Washington Vaccine Equity Initiative. This initiative supports equitable vaccine access by providing funds to trusted, community-based organizations that can provide linguistically and culturally-specific vaccine education and outreach. These organizations also address access, mobility and transportation barriers. Grant funds are flexible and distributed to organizations serving regions and communities with the highest need.

For a list of recently funded organizations, please visit Vaccine Equity Initiative Grants and Grantees All In WA.

Since September 2020, the Washington State Department of Health (DOH) has partnered with Desautel Hege (DH) to support community-driven COVID-19 outreach & communications. This effort specifically focuses on connecting with priority communities who have been disproportionately impacted during this pandemic and experience access barriers to COVID-19 information and services. The COVID-19 Community Media Outreach Progress Report Summary, May 21, 2021 (PDF) provides an overview of these efforts as well as insights for both the project and future public health communications efforts.

Information is one of the best tools we have in this fight against COVID-19, said Gov. Jay Inslee. But not every community has equal access to information. This plan helps ensure every Washingtonian is better able to stay safe and healthy by making sure our state agencies are providing information that is culturally-relevant and accessible.

In April 2020, the Washington State Department of Health Community Engagement Task Force worked with the Governor's Office to create a COVID-19 Response Language Access Plan. This created a foundation for language access that we continue to leverage for vaccine communications, education, and outreach efforts.

The Washington State Department of Health is the lead entity for distribution and allocation of vaccines. We provide guidance to prioritize populations for vaccine. We also enroll providers as vaccinators and determine weekly allocation of doses among those providers in consultation with local public health agencies. We are committed to strengthening our own efforts as well as supporting local public health agency efforts in centering communities in vaccine outreach and access.

Overall considerations for vaccine outreach

Overall considerations for vaccine access

Community-specific tools and resources

To ensure equitable and accessible outreach, education, and implementation strategies, the Department of Health is building a COVID-19 Vaccine Implementation Collaborative. The Collaborative launched in February 2021 but interested partners can join at any time. Collaborative members:

Our community engagement efforts have shown us how critical it is to lead vaccine conversations with cultural humility. For us, this means understanding that historical distrust, trauma, and broken relationships are a result of systemic inequities, racism, and medical harm many historically marginalized groups have experienced. We are developing and collecting anti-racism and trauma-informed tools, training, and resources for vaccine providers and partners. If you have resources to add and share with others, please email equity@doh.wa.gov.

Resources

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COVID-19 Vaccine - Equity and Engagement - Washington State Department of Health