Summary:
Suffolk County Council’s Covid Response team was created to manage the Covid-19 Pandemic. The team consisted of a range of skills, from various sectors across the Council and included some new posts to enable the Council to respond to the impact of the virus.
Within the Covid Response team, there was a branch of Community Engagement Officers who played a pivotal part in all aspects of Covid management.
In response to vaccination uptake the Community Engagement Officers wanted to target specific, vulnerable communities within their County to increase uptake. The Council used data and intelligence to pinpoint areas of low uptake and then researched the communities within them.
Suffolk County Council were already working with the Roma community through a group called Ipswich Roma Inclusion Support (IRIS). This group had been created from a recognised need for extra guidance, engagement and care, especially by Suffolk schools.
Suffolk’s Roma community was hesitant toward vaccination. The community were hard-hit early in the pandemic, with two young men tragically passing away, leaving young families without a father or an income. An interpreter trusted by the community informed us that during a call to his mother immediately before sedation in intensive care, one of these men had said (or his mother had understood) that he was to be given an injection. His subsequent death led some in the community to conclude that the pandemic was being used as a pretext to give Roma people lethal injections. People who had previously engaged with the NHS began to withdraw and even routine and childhood vaccinations were being missed within this community.