¡Es Tiempo de Vacunarte!: Health Communication to Improve HPV Vaccination Rates in El Paso
04/28/2020
Earlier this year, the CHC began a new project and partnership with the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso Department of Family and Community Medicine to develop messages for social media and text messages to promote HPV vaccination. The program, It’s Time to Get Vaccinated! 2 / ¡Es Tiempo de Vacunarte! 2, is in its second round of funding from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT). PIs on the project are Drs. Matt McGlone and Keri Stephens from the Moody College of Communication.
We are partnering with a program in El Paso that provides free vaccinations to children and young adults, ages 9-26, in El Paso County; it has recently expanded to include the neighboring counties of Hudspeth, Culberson, Presidio, and Brewster. Key program components include delivering educational materials regarding the HPV vaccine as well as providing healthcare navigation assistance to community members. Bilingual community health workers, or promotores, deliver educational materials adapted from the CDC via oral presentations to encourage vaccination; bilingual navigators assist community members with scheduling appointments, identifying community resources to address individual barriers, such as transportation, and making reminder calls for follow-up appointments.
Our role in the project is to create message content for social media and text messages that promote HPV vaccinations in these borderland communities. In line with the CHC’s dedication to evidence-based health communication, we spent about two months at the start of the spring 2020 semester conducting a literature review of effective communication methods in promoting HPV vaccination and an environmental scan of existing HPV vaccination campaigns. We focused attention on research in the Latinx community, as this is a prevalent community in our target audience.
Key findings from this phase of the project include:
- The need to have two different streams of messaging content: a campaign for parents and a campaign for young adults/teens. We found that perceived barriers, motivating factors, and knowledge of HPV and the HPV vaccine vary between these two groups.
- The importance of using a personal narrative approach when connecting to Latinx communities.
- The necessity of being aware of cultural factors that may promote or hinder HPV vaccine uptake.
The second phase of this project is concerned with primary formative research, which we plan to conduct via focus groups in the five target counties. Our team is in the process of finalizing two sets of focus group questions, an accompanying demographic survey, and a recruitment strategy plan. Though the timeline for conducting focus groups in the target counties remains unclear during this time of social distancing, we are excited to craft questions that we hope will encourage future participants to share their thoughts surrounding HPV vaccination.
While the project will carry on after my time as a CHC intern ends and social distancing orders are lifted, I have gained valuable experience from our research review and scan, creating a CHC branded presentation, and using our findings to develop a focus group interview guide. I value the opportunity to contribute to the health communication knowledge base regarding how to best promote HPV vaccination among young people in El Paso and in Latinx communities more broadly.
About the Author
Jenny Van Overdam is a graduate student in the Health Behavior and Health Education program through the College of Education at UT Austin and is interning with the CHC in spring 2020. Jenny works alongside CHC Program Coordinator, Ryann Freeman, primarily on a literature review and environmental scan, among other tasks, for the It’s Time to Vaccinate! 2 / ¡Es Tiempo de Vacunarte! 2 program. Her career goals include using creative communication practices to teach and/or design effective wellness programming