On 27 April 2023, this webinar, featuring a panel of experts, will draw on new evidence from research on Mpox in Nigeria, as well as wider research on national, regional and global perspectives on epidemic preparedness and response, to explore questions such as how can global efforts interconnect more effectively with national and regional preparedness, taking account of varying priorities and perspectives? And what can be done to strengthen community-level efforts for outbreak detection and care provision?
On Wednesday 16 November 2022 between 12:00-15:00 GMT, The Wellcome Trust collaborative Pandemics Preparedness Project is hosting Shifting Power in Pandemics, a public webinar on connecting and supporting preparedness ‘from below’. Shifting Power in Pandemics, will explore issues surrounding connecting and supporting preparedness from below and feature expert speakers from Africa, the Americas and Europe, including investigators from SSHAP.
This Practical Approaches brief highlights key considerations for taking a psychosocial approach to working in the context of an epidemic. Public health emergencies can cultivate fear, anger and grief, and deeply impact the wider social fabric. Exposure to disease is frightening to many.
When people are frightened, they may avoid or flee treatment facilities and distrust those responding to the epidemic. They are also more difficult to ‘engage’ through traditional mechanisms. Furthermore, people in affected areas may misattribute signs of worry (headaches, stomach-ache, etc.) as symptoms of the disease, which can increase suffering and overwhelm health services.
Trust is an essential component of successful cooperative endeavours. The global health response to the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak confronted historically tenuous regional relationships of trust. Challenging sociopolitical contexts and initially inappropriate communication strategies impeded trustworthy relationships between communities and responders during the epidemic. Social scientists affiliated with the Ebola 100-Institut Pasteur project interviewed approximately 160 local, national and international responders holding a wide variety of roles during the epidemic. Focusing on responder’s experiences of communities’ trust during the epidemic, this qualitative study identifies and explores social techniques for effective emergency response. The response required individuals with diverse knowledges and experiences.
Responders’ included on-the-ground social mobilisers, health workers and clinicians, government officials, ambulance drivers, contact tracers and many more. We find that trust was fostered through open, transparent and reflexive communication that was adaptive and accountable to community-led response efforts and to real-time priorities.