WORKING alongside minority groups and associations could be key to driving uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations, South Australian pharmacist, Irfan Hashmi, believes.
Having rolled out a free influenza immunisation program in conjunction with Multicultural Communities Australia (PD 17 Jun 2020), last year, the new Pharmacy Guild of Australia SA Branch Committee Member (PD 12 Jan), told Pharmacy Daily that a similar approach could help tackle issues around vaccine hesitancy amongst patients from minority backgrounds.
"During my work for flu vaccines with multicultural communities in SA, many people got flu vaccines for the first time," he said.
"Community leaders of those communities played a major role to invite and encourage people to get flu vaccines in our clinics with flyers to translate into many languages circulated with the help of social media groups.
"For COVID vaccines, I would suggest authorities to use community pharmacists to spread messages through their community leaders.
"Multicultural associations can play a vital role to make this job easier.
"I plan to contact all my connections with such associations to spread the word on the COVID vaccines service."
Meanwhile The Pharmaceutical Journal has reported that a pharmacist-led COVID vaccination site at a mosque in Birmingham, UK, has helped to easy concerns among the local black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.
Pharmacists from the Masters Group, which is running the site said they were receiving calls from patients asking to be vaccinated at the mosque.
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