Exploring vaccination rates amongst pregnant women and children in deprived ethnic minority communities 

Pregnant women and children are more likely to miss out on getting their routine vaccines if they are from an ethnic minority or live in a poorer area, which also means they are less likely to get their COVID vaccination. This project aimed to help vaccine services improve so more pregnant women and children could get vaccinated including against COVID-19. 

What did we do? 

In 2018 Dr Helen Skirrow of ARC NWL began a collaboration with the Mosaic Community Trust, funded by the NIHR Imperial BRC and the IMPRINT network. The Westminster based project looked at pregnancy vaccine rates and the reasons for low uptake. The researchers quickly discovered that the local population felt that their views had not been listened to. In 2021 Dr Skirrow was awarded a personal NIHR Doctoral Fellowship. As part of this Mosaic Community Trust and Dr Skirrow are working with families to understand why not enough children are getting vaccinated in Northwest London. Research into pregnancy vaccine uptake inequalities has continued, including on: 

• Women’s experiences of accessing pregnancy and infant vaccines during the pandemic 

• Women’s views on accepting COVID-19 pregnancy vaccines, funded by Imperial COVID-19 response fund and also the IMPRINT network 

What was the impact? On the ground, Mosaic’s community health advocates through their collaboration with Dr Skirrow have: 

• Increased their vaccine knowledge 

• Become vaccine advocates 

• By being part of the research team, have learnt skills that are transferable to other professional and personal areas Mosaic community health advocates have also been trained on how to facilitate focus groups which has allowed them to lead the ones connected to the project. 

Dr Skirrow is also collaborating with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and UK HSA. This collaboration has led to several peer reviewed research papers. This research found that during the pandemic pregnant women from poorer neighbourhoods who also came from ethnic minority groups were more likely to have felt unsafe accessing vaccines for themselves and their babies. This means that inequalities in vaccine uptake may have been worsened by the pandemic. The ARC is now collaborating with the Northwest London Integrated Care System which will lead to the development of a Maternity Equity and Equality Strategy to better support local under-served communities.

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