In partnership with local people and health professionals, Joe Tucker, MD, PhD, and UNC Global Health colleagues developed a pay-it-forward intervention to promote influenza vaccination among at-risk individuals during COVID-19.
“You are an overworked health professional in an under-developed rural town within a low/middle-income country. Many of the patients in your community health clinic are illiterate, some have disability, and all of them are concerned about COVID-19. Will this resource-constrained pandemic context fuel cynicism, burnout, and callousness among patients and providers? Our research study found the opposite, underlining enduring generosity in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.
“In partnership with local people and health professionals, we developed a pay-it-forward intervention to promote influenza vaccination among at-risk individuals during COVID-19. Pay-it-forward has an individual receive a gift (e.g., an influenza vaccination or community-engaged message) from a local person and then be asked about supporting subsequent individuals.”
Read the rest of this blog post at Nature Medicine, written by Joe Tucker, MD, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Medicine and director of UNC Project-China.
Also in Nature Medicine, check this paper by Tucker and colleagues, including first author Weiming Tang, PhD, assistant professor of infectious diseases at UNC and assistant director of UNC Project-China.
Pay-it-forward programs, where someone receives a gift or free service, and then gives a gift to another person in return, have expanded during COVID-19 and provide an opportunity for healthcare providers to reduce costs, increase uptake of interventions such as testing and vaccines, and promote sustainability.