Targeted COVID-19 Messaging: Reaching At-Risk Communities

Announcer:
You’re listening toClinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Amesh Adalja, who’s a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an Affiliate of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health. He’ll be talking about enhancing public messaging for marginalized communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s Dr. Adalja now.

Dr. Adalja:
When it comes to messaging, you can actually tailor messages to groups that are most at risk, groups that are disproportionately impacted, or groups that don’t usually get information, and that would be by really using trusted messengers in those people’s communities to talk to them about the science, talk to them about the protective actions they may need to take, and talk to them about how uniquely they might be at risk because maybe they live in a multigenerational home, maybe they have a lot of frontline essential workers in their household, and maybe they have not been people that have used other countermeasures, like flu vaccines or regular doctor visits. You really have to meet people where they are. And that sounds like a cliche, but it’s actually true.

So you have to understand the population you’re trying to reach and understand what the barriers might be to them taking the appropriate protective action or using the medical technologies that are available. And then you actually address those things, you set examples, and you have influencers. We do this all the time when we want people to buy a product. There’s social media influencers and marketing companies who know how to use this. You have to actually retail the public health at the door-to-door level the way brands retail their products in a very precision-guided manner. Those types of lessons I think would help increase uptake and acceptance of certain recommendations by populations that might be marginalized or not necessarily targeted by the mainstream thrust of the messaging or ones that you really want to reach because they’re at higher risk and they don’t quite know it. 

Announcer:
That was Dr. Amesh Adalja talking about the importance of tailoring public communication during a pandemic. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!