The Autumn Plan – EstMSA Estonia

Name of the activity: The Autumn Plan

Country/NMO: EstMSA Estonia

Program: Communicable Diseases

Contact information: contact [email protected] to get in touch with the Activity Coordinator

Type of the activity: First-time Activity

Category: Campaign

Focus area: Work to increase rate of Vaccination

Sustainable Development Goals addressed: 

Problem statement:

Estonia has a COVID-19 vaccination rate of 79% with at least one dose among people in the age group 60+. This puts stress on Estonia’s medical system by flooding hospitals with COVID patients, reducing the capability of giving necessary care to other illnesses and exhausts our healthcare workers. In order to raise the vaccination rate, a lot of people need one on one consultations to help to learn about the overall safety of these and the skill to distinguish misleading information.

Target groups:

• General population
• Elderly people

Beneficiaries:

• General population
• Doctors
• Other health professionals
• Elderly people

Objectives:

1. The project aims to reach as many unvaccinated people as possible, and our specific goal is to consult up to 2500 patients by the end of the project.
2. To have at least 40 volunteers take the Motivational Interviewing course.
3. Primary care doctors are interested in our project – at least 40 primary care doctors will sign up to participate.
4. To have 30 skilled and trained volunteers who make 10 phone calls per week. 
5. To have people register themselves for vaccination and mention us for helping them make a decision. 
6. Volunteers can practice communication with people regarding difficult and changing healthcare related topics and will feel more confident in their skills after the project
7. Raise individuals awareness about the safety of the vaccines and to counteract with deliberately false or misleading information in media and social media platforms.

Indicators of Success:

1. Number of patients reached by phone who were consulted about Covid-19 vaccinations using Motivational Interviewing – 2500
2. Number of volunteers who participated in Motivational Interviewing training – 40
3. Number of primary care doctors who participated in our project – 40
4. Number of volunteers who made at least 10 calls a week – 30 
5. Getting feedback from 50% of the primary care doctors that patients have mentioned us
6. More than half of the volunteers participating will give feedback that they feel more confident about their communication skills after the project compared to before.

Methodology:

Our activity consists of training volunteers in motivational interviewing and then having them call to unvaccinated people (whose data we get from primary care providers) and then if they are willing to, consulting them on their vaccine hesitancy by motivational interviewing. Shortly said, it means that volunteers do not press their opinions on people, but they only ask related questions and the patients mostly talk. This will make them feel comfortable in the conversation, they will be able to open up more and also trust the caller more, thereby there is a higher chance, that the patient will start to doubt their opinions on not vaccinating and they will themselves start asking questions about the vaccines. To keep the volunteers ready for different situations supervisions are made, where the volunteers reflect on themselves and also get advice from University of Tartu’s lectors.

Plans for evaluation:

To evaluate the efficiency of our method, we use two curriculums.  Mainly we have been gathering feedback from primary care doctors by comparing the names of those who we have called and those who have registered to vaccinate or have mentioned our calls to the doctors. For our internal reports our volunteers have also estimated the outcome of the calls by themselves, which has shown that almost ⅓ of the calls end with positive feedback. The other curriculum is recording and transcribing the calls, by which then the transcripts are analysed and summary is made by analysing the outcome of the calls and the questions that were asked. The second curriculum also offers an objective way to study the main fears of vaccines and how big of an impact does motivational interviewing have on relieving them, as numerous people will analyse the transcript and cooperatively find the most likely option. 

External collaborations:

• NGO Law Firm Sorainen-legal advice and drafting contracts
• NGO Digital contract signing website-software for managing contracts
• NGO Pipedrive- workspace for organising volunteer’s tasks and calls
• University of Tartu- granted rooms, granted telecommunication software, lectors
• Government agency Estonian Health Insurance Fund – funding by paying salary
• NGO healthcare firm HeBa – general advice