Vaccination: exploring vaccine confidence with people from African, Bangladeshi, Caribbean and Pakistani backgrounds living in England

Since January, the Healthwatch network has gathered views and experiences from 15,000 people across England about the Covid-19 vaccine and the roll out. Overall, feedback has been positive but uptake is still significantly lower among specific communities, and there remain issues of vaccine confidence among groups now being targeted for the vaccine.

Healthwatch England commissioned Traverse to undertake in-depth conversations and online exercises with 95 participants from African, Bangladeshi, Caribbean, and Pakistani ethnicity over a period of five weeks during March and April.

The engagement and research was with people who have primarily hesitant attitudes or lack confidence in the vaccines, testing out a number of hypotheses as to why people are hesitant and what could be done to give additional assurance. It is clear from this work that attitudes to the vaccine are incredibly personal and it is important not to make broad conclusions about the views of whole communities as a result of these findings.

We have therefore taken great care, and with some caution, pulled out some themes from this complex piece of research to help the Department for Health and Social Care, NHS England and Improvement and others to take action. It is also worth noting that both the findings from this work and the way in which it was undertaken provide important lessons beyond the Covid-19 vaccines programme and can help as we all work together to tackle health inequalities.