Title: Planning a Communication Activity
Course: Level 3 - Immunization > Section: Effective Communication and Promotion of Immunization Program

Planning how to communicate with the community, supervisors and other stakeholders is essential to avoid the communication barriers and gives you the opportunity to be understood which in turn will increase the EPI coverage rates and decrease dropout rates. The barriers that may hinder you from being understood by others may include:

- Language.
- Sex/gender and age.
- Educational level.
- Attitude.
- Understanding of message.
- Voice quality.
- Disagreement b/n verbal and non-verbal messages.
- Lack of motivation.
- Unwillingness to change.
- Hearing problem.

- Values and belief.
- Economic status.
- Physical barrier.
- Timing.
- Trust.
- Lack of self-confidence.
- Lack of feedback.
- Selective perception.
- Expectations.

Steps in Planning a Communication

The steps involved in planning a communication for effective immunisation coverage includes:

i) Conducting a communication needs assessment: in your community, there might be barriers that hinder the community from bringing their child to the health institution for immunisation. As already discussed above in this session, there may be a lot of barriers in your community. You may be able to identify specific behaviour or attitudes which are creating a barrier to immunisation in the community. Has there been an adverse incident in the past that has worried parents? Is there an opinion leader in the community who is opposed to immunisation and has persuaded others to resist it? Therefore, assessing for this gaps or barriers will help you set the strategy and action plan for the community.

ii) Setting objectives and strategies: once you identified the barriers, it is important to determine which of these barriers might it be possible to remove and how it helps to increase immunisation coverage rates and decrease dropout rates. I t could also help you know why many children are not brought to a health facility for immunisation. In Ethiopia, reasons for not bringing children to immunization service may include lack of awareness on need of immunization and/or need to return for next dose, vaccine not available, mothers too busy, place and time of immunization not known, immunization site too far, fear of adverse effects, and time of immunization session not convenient. Therefore, when you set objective/s, you need to address questions like what message is it you want to communicate? What media is appropriate? Are resources available? Also, there are some possible strategies or activities you can use to get your message across to the community. These might include a community conversation, a community mobilisation or advocacy program.

Implementation/take action is the step on which you put your plans and strategies into action. According to the preset objective and strategy, you need to intervene on the identified communication barriers so that you may resolve the problem which in turn help you increase your immunisation coverage and decrease dropout rates in your community.

iii) Monitoring and evaluation: this is a step to determine whether your strategies are working. You can assess if your intervention has brought a difference in different ways. You could record how many people attended the meeting or community conversation, and who they were. You could then monitor how many of these people have shown a change in behaviour. You could see if these people brought their children for immunisation, or brought them more regularly than before. Also, if someone who is not known to you brings their children for immunisation for the first time, you could ask how they knew the immunisation was available.