Covid-19 Resources
Our project for this fund is to connect with ethnic people who have challenges with accessibility in getting vaccinated in remote areas using a mobile vaccination service.
We have a special focus on those who are elderly and living with disabilities, who have issues with accessibility, and transport, and psychologically vaccine-hesitant. Our prioritisation of accessibility and remoteness is because our team consists of two vaccinators who will be travelling with us to high-priority areas in Waikato.
Going to people alleviates many obstacles regarding getting to vaccine sites, and being vaccinated in people’s own communities can foster a sense of familiarity, and aid with hesitations about being vaccinated. This is supported by data from the Horizon 2021 Covid-19 report, unvaccinated people are more likely to get vaccinated if they do so with their family.
Our project plan involves
- Consultation with key people involved in the COVID-19 Vaccine Implementation Programme to prioritize those in most need
- Promoting our project with consent in high visibility places that provide essential services, such as supermarkets, service stations, worship places, different community houses, and local businesses to ensure that people are aware of the dates that will be in town.
- Provide registration services for participants.
- Visiting every area twice, so if someone misses us we are able to organise another time to meet them. This also gives time for word-of-mouth communications.
- Collaboration with on-call interpreters who will be advised of the days and times we will be travelling. This ensures we communicate effectively with people who have language barriers.
- Two vaccinators will be travelling with us when we travel to rural areas and will be at our local events. They are a medical student of 7 years trained in New Zealand, and a midwife of 16 years who were registered overseas.
- Local events will take place every Friday or Saturday for two months at the Waikato Settlement Centre, with a total of 8 events.
- Marketing collaboration with Waikato’s local access radio ‘Free FM 89.0’, which have radio programmes in different languages to help promote our service.
- We have record-keeping processes and administrators so we can send feedback with a report of the number and percentage of people who received a vaccine through our services based on different ages, gender, and ethnicity.
- Providing incentives such as refreshments (such as cool drinks, hot drinks, and snacks), and food vouchers. We also have driving lesson vouchers from a business that is supporting the project.
