At a vaccination clinic in Central Falls hosted by the nonprofit Progreso Latino, promotoras, or community health workers, inform participants about a Brown University-led research project to address barriers to COVID-19 testing and vaccination among the local Hispanic/Latinx populations as well as high-risk children.

The promotoras also invite participants to join focus groups to help researchers better understand attitudes around testing and vaccination so that they can design and implement more effective health programs.

The project is a partnership between Brown, Progreso Latino, the Rhode Island Quality Institute and the Rhode Island Parent Information Network. Funded with $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health, it’s part of a national initiative called RADx-UP that is aimed at understanding and reducing the factors that place a disproportionate burden of the pandemic on vulnerable populations so that community-driven interventions can be implemented to decrease these disparities.

In this second phase of the project, Brown experts in biomedical informatics and biostatistics are working with community partners to interpret the data from focus groups and other sources.

“We hope this partnership will help us understand patterns of hesitancy regarding COVID testing and vaccination and, crucially, determine ways in which we can overcome those barriers and increase the participation of these vulnerable populations,” said project leader Dr. Sharon Rounds, associate dean for clinical affairs at Brown and a professor of medicine.

For More Information on RADx-UP see this news article.

Information Originally posted on Brown's Facebook Page; Photo Credit: Progreso Latino