Practice Title: Community Partnerships for COVID-19 Response
Department: Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness
Size: Large (Population of 500,000+ people)
State: Kentucky
Summary of Practice:
The Louisville-Jefferson County Metropolitan Government's (LMG) Department of Public Health and Wellness (LMPHW) is an accredited, independent, academic health department. Our mission to achieve health equity and improve the health and well-being of all Louisville residents and visitors is realized by our 265 employees, led by Dr. Sarah Moyer, a board-certified physician and Mayor Greg Fischer’s Chief Health Strategist. As of 2017, Metro Louisville’s population was 770,517 and is the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s most populous city and urban center.
Much like the rest of the United States, minority populations in Louisville, KY have faced higher rates of infection and death during the COVID-19 pandemic. While LMPHW worked hard to fight the spread of COVID, these populations ultimately did not receive information, outreach, and access to early vaccination at the same rates as other Louisville residents. A planning team within the Center for Health Equity of LMPHW determined that building partnerships with community organizations was critical for reaching populations that LMPHW had not been able to reach through existing vaccination and education campaigns.
• By contracting community organizations to do outreach, promote vaccination, host a mobile vaccine clinic, and host a listening session, our goals were: o Increase access to vaccinations within the city’s most vulnerable and underserved populations. o Learn what barriers to vaccination persisted, and o Determine additional COVID related needs.
• Primary objectives: o Building relationships with community organizations in order to build trust within the community. o Connecting residents with a medical expert, representative of their community with whom they could ask questions and get solid explanations on COVID-19 and the vaccine. o Identify both short-term and long-term opportunities for continued community engagement. Community partners were identified through previous health department relationships as well through networking across the city.
As a contractor, these community organizations were required to help share information about COVID-19 with their community, host a listening session in partnership with LMPHW, and host a mobile vaccination clinic within their community. Data from listening sessions was then pulled together into a report to both inform health department planning, and to inform the community of LMPHW’s response.
A full summary of these sessions is compiled into our “Community Partnership Listening Session Summary Report.” An additional “Executive Summary” serves as a shorter synopsis of the full report. The report looked for themes according to immediate needs as well as opportunities for longer-term partnerships and collaboration. Through this process, we hoped to capture the knowledge and experience of the community and inform our response in a way that most appropriately met the needs of diverse populations.
Listening to the community became the cornerstone of LMPHW’s COVID response. Listening sessions identified how best to serve people of color, how best to do outreach and communication, and how best to rebuild a long era of mistrust. The overall public health impact of the community partnership program was to reduce fear around the vaccine, increase trust in health partnerships, increase rates of vaccination, and reduce disparities in COVID infections and deaths.
Community Partnerships for COVID-19 Response
Category
Health Equity and Social Justice