Sunday, March 30, 2025
3/30/2025
Boston Public Health Commission "Advancing Health Literacy to EnhanceEquitable Community Responses to COVID-19" - Urban area: Boston, Massachusetts. Population of focus: The project is led by the Boston Public Health Commission (the city’s health department) and will address: inequities in the impact of COVID-19 on Boston residents who are Black, Latinx, of limited English proficiency, immigrants or members of other marginalized groups; and unequal access to culturally competent vaccination, testing and other treatment and prevention services. Goals: (1) Increase and evaluate acceptability and use of COVID-19-related outreach, service delivery, education and media messaging that reduces inequities in access to COVID-19 prevention and treatment; and (2) based on evaluation findings, develop more effective, culturally competent and replicable outreach and service delivery models for future local public health efforts to reduce health inequities. Objectives: (1) Partnerships: By the end of year 1, to achieve project goals, strengthen or establish partnerships with at least 12 community-based organizations with deep connections to the target population. Partners will include community health centers, neighborhood organizations, faith-based, and worker and immigrant organizations and others that engage people of color in the city. Many partners are already in place. Partners will be chosen for their connection to communities most affected by inequities in vaccination, testing and treatment. They will conduct outreach, engagement and health literacy activities tailored to their communities. (2) Health literacy strategies: Working with key partners, and with our minority-serving institutional partner (the Mauricio Gastón Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston), we will develop and implement health literacy strategies for our focus population. Some activities will be broad-based; others will use culturally and linguistically appropriate messages focused on specific groups and tailored to their concerns, hopes and interests—e.g., Haitian-Americans, Brazilian immigrants, younger Latinx men, LGBTQ youth, parents of young children. A key element of our strategy will be health promoters—community members trained and employed to conduct outreach activities within their communities and social networks, and who could be present at vaccination clinics. (3) New models: Our findings will inform the development of more effective multicultural and multilingual models for engaging communities in public health prevention and treatment activities. These models will be extremely valuable to future vaccination campaigns for other communicable diseases—e.g., influenza—and for increasing health literacy for other prevention, testing, and treatment activities. Evaluation: The Gastón Institute will lead a mixed methods evaluation using data analysis, key informant interviews, online surveys, focus groups, town halls, social network analysis and other strategies to: (1) determine which groups are most affected by inequities in COVID-19 vaccination, testing and treatment outcomes; (2) understand what kinds of messages and outreach strategies can best engage these groups and improve understanding and uptake of COVID-19 vaccination, testing, and treatment; (3) evaluate project strategies based both on specific objectives (# vaccinated, # tested), on how residents, community leaders, health care workers and others describe their experiences with these engagement strategies, and on adherence to National CLAS Standards; (4) continuously report information to the project team so it can adjust communications and engagement strategies to improve project results and identify additional population segments that may be affected by inequities at each stage (e.g., initial vaccination, flu vaccination, boosters). (5) use what we are learning to develop multicultural and multilingual models of communication, engagement, healthcare delivery and preparedness for socially vulnerable populations.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).