Work package 2: Community engagement and involvement (CEI)

Work package 2 is led by Dr Mary McCauley, Dr Linda Nyondo-Mipando, and Marie Gomez.

Our CEI activities will include advocacy campaigns, awareness raising events in the community, focus group discussions (FGD), key informant interviews, cascade training, and social media campaigns using videos and other communications tools with the support of the WHA and both communications teams at MRCG and MLW and national communication channels (TV and radio).

In Malawi, we will work with the Patient and Community Welfare Foundation of Malawi (PAWEM), a patient representative organization to co-host regular community meetings with pregnant women and their partners throughout the project. We will establish an HBV patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) group in each country.

In our Malawi partnership, there is already a well-established maternal health PPIE group that has contributed to numerous research studies to date. This group will train and mentor members of the entire research team on effective CEI.

The PPIE groups will be involved from the beginning of the study and will contribute to the development of the protocol, information sheets, consent forms, educational materials and communication tools. The local PPIE groups will co-host monthly meetings with pregnant women and their families in the study sites for the first three months of the study to help with the study co-design and ensure understanding and community sensitization; and then every three months to ensure ongoing community engagement and identify participant perceptions, ideas, fears and needs, to ensure the participant voice is shared with all research team members; this will directly feed into all work packages, to enable the research team to understand the individual benefits and risks of the proposed intervention, improve the study conduct and maximize the sustainable impact of the intervention on the health of infants and their mothers.

The PPIE groups will be also involved in annual large events alongside the world hepatitis day (28th July) and the World Hepatitis testing week (in November) with the support of the communication teams at our partner organisation for national communication channels using TV, radio and print media. The WP2 will facilitate dissemination of our activities and findings at international, national and community levels.