Lambeth Council

Between March and December 2021, in partnership with Lambeth Council, Royal Society for Public Health Training Solutions, in partnership with Lambeth Council and RBE Associates, delivered the Level 2 Award in Encouraging Vaccination Uptake to over 160 professionals in the borough ranging from contact tracers to social care staff.

With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the national vaccination programme, we’ve seen a real a need for skills and knowledge around vaccine hesitancy, which is why RSPH created the RSPH Level 2 Award in Encouraging Vaccination Uptake. We worked with Graham Rushbrook, Director of RBE Associates, who helped design the training as well as lead on the delivery.

The qualification provides learners with an understanding of the importance of vaccination programmes, and the key causes of vaccine concern and vaccine hesitancy. It supports learners to develop their knowledge of behaviour change models and ways in which they can be applied in one-to-one conversations and group consultations about vaccination programmes. We worked with Lambeth Council for eight months to deliver the Level 2 Award to over 160 professionals including contact tracers, public health teams, housing staff, volunteers, and social care teams. We also delivered a bespoke version of the training to Lambeth Councillors to provide them with the skills and knowledge to have conversations around vaccine hesitancy with their constituents. The feedback from the training was incredibly positive, with:

An 87% increase in knowledge about vaccination programmes.
A 97% increase in knowledge about the sources of vaccine concern and vaccine hesitancy.
A 92% increase in confidence in having conversations with individuals about vaccination programmes.
100% of respondents said they would recommend the training to others.

Find out more about the qualification

In the past few months many of us have had conversations with Lambeth residents who had low levels of confidence in the vaccine, often due to a variety of different reasons and misinformation.
The vaccine is also a very emotive and sensitive subject for many people and often our frontline staff have found that bluntly putting across facts and figures does not help the conversation, but rather makes people even more hesitant.

We wanted to commission a training programme to help give staff the confidence to have positive conversations with residents, encouraging and motivating them to book their COVID-19 vaccine, as well as opening opportunities to talk about health and wellbeing more broadly.

The staff who have attended the training gave overwhelmingly positive feedback, reporting a marked improvement in both the knowledge of vaccine concern, and confidence around hosting conversations to encourage vaccine uptake.

Margherita Sweetlove, Public Health Specialist at Lambeth London Borough Council

One in eight

of those living in the most deprived areas would not be likely to receive the vaccine

Around one in ten adults

reported vaccine hesitancy

between January and February 2021

One in six

parents living with a dependent child aged 0 to 4 years report vaccine hesitancy

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Lambeth Council