Engaging with the Bangladeshi community in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea
Exploring vaccine hesitancy
A dynamic engagement programme designed to enable local NHS service providers to gain a better understanding of how Flu and COVID-19 vaccine take up could be increased for the local Bangladeshi community.
Project status: completed
In partnership with NHS England Vaccine Equalities Team and BME Health Forum
Our Partners
The challenge
NHS England approached us to develop an engagement programme that explores how local Bangladeshi people access information about healthcare, how they feel about NHS vaccination services, and how well COVID-19 vaccine messaging works for them. They also asked us to identify the current health priorities and challenges within the community.
What we did
As part of the engagement programme we developed, we held a series of focus groups with members of the local Bangladeshi community. Our programme was designed to engage with as many people as possible and made use of a variety of engagement methods, including online conversations and in-person meetings with an interpreter.
Results
We designed a series of recommendations for service providers and shared our findings with NHS England Vaccine Equalities Team, North West London Integrated Care Service, and local vaccination programme providers. Alongside this, NHS England used the framework we designed to inform a similar engagement programme conducted by twelve Healthwatch organisations elsewhere in the country with local Bangladeshi communities.
WHO WE LISTENED TO
We held two focus groups with members of the local Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea. Each focus group contained between eight and 12 participants.
OUR APPROACH
We engaged with the local Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities through a series of focus groups. To ensure we spoke to as many people as possible, we held both virtual and in-person focus groups.
As some participants did not speak English, or had English as an additional language, we held a dedicated focus group with an interpreter. We offered participants the opportunity to speak to us in private one-to-one conversations if they wished. In order to reach young people and parents, we ran our engagement programme in July 2022, before the school summer holiday.
We worked with NHS England Vaccine Equalities Team to develop a series of open, engaging questions.
REPORTING AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Following our focus groups, we developed a series of recommendations for local service providers and decision makers in the NHS. These recommendations were designed to increase both vaccine take up in the Bangladeshi community and highlight areas where the NHS could better meet the needs of the community generally.
We published these recommendations alongside a full report of our findings.
“This programme highlighted the challenges that many ethnic minority communities face when accessing healthcare. Many of the members of the Bangladeshi community we engaged with spoke about the linguistic and cultural barriers they face in Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, and how difficult it is to find accurate information. Healthcare providers must act on our recommendations to ensure that services work for everyone.”