Improving Conversations With COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitant Patients: Action Research to Support Family Physicians

Abstract

Vaccination delivery and efforts to counter vaccine hesitancy have become focal issues for family medicine teams as the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved. Conducting action research, our team developed an interactive web-based guide to improve clinical conversations around a broad range of vaccine hesitancies presented by patients. The paper presents a step-by-step account of the guide being codesigned with family physicians—its targeted end users—in a process that included validation interviews; role-play interviews; and user-tested design. The validation interviews sought to understand the pragmatic realities of vaccine hesitancy in family medicine clinical practice relative to relevant psychological theories. The role-play interviews drew out conversational strategies and advice from family physicians. The principles of motivational interviewing—an evidence-based approach to vaccine hesitancy conversations that supplements information deficit approaches—were used to codesign the content and lay-out of the guide. User counts, stakeholder engagement, and web-based analytics indicate the guide is being used extensively. Formal evaluation of the guide is presently underway.