Community and stakeholder engagement experiences in developing a COVID-19 social disparities index for Brazil
Language: Portuguese with English sub-titles
Maria Yury Ichihara and her team at the Centre for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health (Cidacs) at Fiocruz in Brazil created a social disparities index to measure inequalities relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as unequal access to healthcare, to identify regions that are more vulnerable to infection and to better focus prevention efforts. The social disparities index link will provide more information about the IDS project and how to access the dashboard.
The team developed the index with available COVID-19 surveillance data, hosted on the Cidacs platform, and built a public data visualisation dashboard to share the index and patterns of COVID-19 incidence and mortality with the broader community. This will enable health managers and policymakers to monitor the pandemic situation in the most vulnerable populations and target social and health interventions.
Key to the success of this project was the extensive community and stakeholder engagement which was embedded in the project from the outset and continued throughout. The team engaged with a wide range and number of community groups and other stakeholders via meetings and webinars, and have recorded their experience in a documentary (below). The team identified four key benefits of the engagement work in their project:
1. New ideas and perspectives from participants were important to guide decision making about SDI-Covid19. For example, the team added a new level of information, the health region, that is more used by policymakers in their daily work
2. The team planned scientific divulgation based on the insights and suggestions of representatives of community groups
3. The team made adjustments to the SDI-Covid-19 interactive dashboard after the opinions given by participants on usability
4. The team gathered new ideas and suggestions that will be important for public engagement at Cidacs more widely
If you would like to know more about this project you can contact Dr Maria Yury Ichihara via email.