S-PHASEC

S-PHASEC (Students Promoting Health Advocacy and Synchronized Engagement with Communities) has been engaged with communities in New Haven, CT and Las Cruces, NM to address vaccine hesitancy and misinformation while tailoring information to the needs of community members by partnering with community based organizations. While we have had successful campaigns using a model based on student volunteer teams working with local public health departments, we are pivoting our model to rely less on full teams in each location, and more on training individual concerned citizens and health professional students in engaging their community while combating misinformation and spreading helpful information. As we have scaled our efforts to different communities, and even countries, we have found that our "hyper-local" model has been successful at addressing local needs, while enabling rapid growth and scalability that could reach a worldwide audience. 

S-PHASEC aims to aid in combating the spread of misinformation related to the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. While it is difficult to estimate the scale and scope of the problem, 54% of those surveyed by KFF have heard and believe or are unsure if they believe several COVID-19 vaccine myths (e.g. the vaccine causes COVID or changes your DNA (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/poll-finding/kff-covid-19-vaccine-monitor-april-2021/), indicating a dire need for intervention.  The rapid proliferation of information has led many to rely on information they receive through community networks and personal relationships due to mistrust in other entities such as federal government, public health departments, or academic institutions. S-PHASEC hopes to use our experience engaging in community based public health communication campaigns to launch a learning community designed to train interested individuals in how they can tackle a public health problem in their community through effective science communication, policy & advocacy, and combating disinformation. 

Our solution is a hybrid model of medical school chapters that will function as long term volunteers for their local health departments and a learning community that supports students and community members who want to tackle a public health problem in their locality. S-PHASEC will launch a learning platform and curriculum that is designed to train people with several skills needed to effectively mitigate disinformation: 1) basic statistics and understanding of relative risk 2) techniques in combating & correcting disinformation 3) how to advocate for policy change 4) strategies for engaging local community based organizations 5) effective science communication. Then, individuals would be encouraged to identify a public health problem in their community and design a proposal that would engage local community based organizations. The S-PHASEC team, associated faculty, and network of other learners would then give feedback and organically form teams to tackle hyper-local public health problems, such as local vaccine hesitancy or vaccine deserts. Ideally, we would have a custom built learning platform to enable easy interaction between cohorts and mentors, but publicly available tools such as Google Classroom would serve as an appropriate intermediate. 

Our solution serves two main populations: 

1) the individuals who have opted to be trained about the importance of public health measures and messaging. This group would be separated into two categories: those with and without science or medicine training. Those with training would likely be health profession students and allied-health professionals. We also we hope to leverage our network to involve trusted messengers who are outside health/science field and would like to serve as advocates to their community to spread verified information. 

2) The second group are the individuals that are positively impacted by the carryover of knowledge gained by the individuals who were trained. This group is going to be our 'primary' target population of community members who have questions and concerns about COVID-19 vaccination. Because WE are not trusted messengers in each community, we hope to train the trusted messengers in group 1. 

Our solution directly addresses the prevention of spread of misinformation and inspiring individuals to protect themselves and their communities because it was designed in response to the deluge of misinformation seen in the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goal is to 

Our model is somewhere between "pilot" and "growth" because we previously have had a successful rollout in several communities in two countries, but as the public discourse around the pandemic has changed, we have plans to adjust our model accordingly. Previously, our model depended on teams of students in various locations, affiliated with local medical schools, who work with their local public health department and community based organizations. They would then collect questions, concerns, and information that is needed by that community by conversations with individuals and we would then work together to either tailor information unav

What makes S-PHASEC innovative is its blended approach focusing on hyper-local needs while considering scalability.

We have 20 members on our core team, who are all volunteers. In addition to that we have a large network of faculty advisors and mentors, most of whom are medical and public health professionals at Yale School of Medicine.