About
European stakeholders face significant variability in addressing vaccination hesitancy and implementing COVID-19 vaccination campaigns among healthcare providers and the general population. Challenges include widespread hesitancy within the population and variations in the communication skills of healthcare providers. To address these issues, cross-country initiatives play a crucial role in knowledge-sharing, especially considering the observed differences in vaccine coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The co-OPERATOR project seeks to capitalize on research findings by developing and piloting a knowledge hub, virtual observatory, and training system across participating countries and beyond. This proof-of-concept initiative aims to gather, structure, and disseminate knowledge, best practices, and resources related to stakeholders’ strategies for COVID-19 vaccination and beyond. The primary focus lies in advancing communication and knowledge skills while addressing systemic barriers and facilitators for effectively promoting vaccination messages to the population.
Objectives
To build survey tools to measure the determinants of vaccine uptake (general population) and of skills for promoting vaccination programmes efficiently (healthcare professionals)
To develop a set of citizen-centred evidence- based, scientifically sound recommendations and advice on how to address low vaccination uptake and to help healthcare professionals communicating more efficiently about vaccines
To provide a comprehensive assessment of factors underlying low vaccination uptake and healthcare professionals’ barriers and facilitators to communicate vaccination information as well as their distribution among target population groups to inform a citizen-centered approach to promote vaccination uptake
To design and develop an intuitive and interactive virtual observatory (the co-OPERATOR platform) to foster dissemination, transferability, utilization of project results across the participating member states, the EU/EEA and beyond
To translate research evidence generated by other WPs into evidence-based recommendations (intervention toolset) by engaging with stakeholders through a Policy Lab to address barriers and knowledge gaps and co-create practical solutions for implementation at regional, national, and European level.