Promoting Vaccination Among Ethnic Minorities

Background: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have established two vaccination campaigns, the Pre-teen Vaccine Campaign and the Seasonal/H1N1 Influenza Vaccination Campaign, that include significant outreach efforts to ethnic minorities.  This presentation outlines the objectives, methods, results and lessons learned from ethnic minority outreach efforts of these two campaigns.

Setting: In addition to focus group testing of minority groups, the CDC has incorporated specific ethnic audience outreach efforts in these campaigns, ranging from ethnic media outreach programs to developing communications materials in Spanish, Korean and Vietnamese.

Population: Ethnic minorities.

Project Description: For both campaigns, CDC conducted a series of Ethnic Media Roundtables (EMR) with New America Media, a group that specializes in outreach to ethnic communities through ethnic news outlets.  The EMRs took place in US cities and communities where larger concentrations of minority groups reside and provided a venue for CDC to discuss influenza vaccination with the ethnic media. CDC’s breadth of ethnic minority outreach through EMRS has included African-American, Arab, Chinese, Hispanic, Indian, Korean, Native-American, Polish, Russian and Vietnamese populations.

Results/Lessons Learned: Ethnic/Minority media is growing in importance as a source of trusted information for its readers, often members are hard to reach audiences. These campaign generated significant interest in the minority/ethnic media providing positive and supportive messaging into target audiences.