What can Ministers do to encourage health boards to actively partner with their local voluntary and third sector to help ensure the vaccine programme is fully inclusive of and accessible to marginalised populations including patients who are frequently ‘missing in health’? Voluntary Health Scotland’s research in February 2021 exposed and highlighted the vaccine barriers facing a wide range of marginalised, overlooked and ‘missing’ populations, including homeless people, people whose first language isn’t English, people living in poverty and people with serious mental health issues. People who are often 'missing in health' despite being entitled to receive services, including the vaccine. We recommended much more targeted/tailored communications alongside assertive outreach through community based events and pop-up clinics. We recommended that health boards actively partner with their local voluntary sector and work with them as trusted intermediaries able to identify, reach, communicate and support marginalised groups to understand the importance of the vaccine and to take it up. Our work was influential in persuading the Scottish Government to establish the Inclusion Vaccine Programme and in the speedy establishment in Lothian of a partnership between NHS Lothian, Edinburgh and Lothians Health Foundation, and the four local Third Sector Intermediaries (TSIs). This partnership has so far seen an investment of £20,000 (through the Foundation) by way of a capacity enhancing micro-grants programme dispersed across Lothian’s voluntary and community sector. The micro-grants programme has enabled a wide range of local organisations to actively communicate with and support people in their community (whether geographic or communities of interest) to get vaccinated. We commend the Lothian model to Ministers, and ask what can be done to persuade other health boards to use their endowment funds in a similar way, to partner with their voluntary sector and capacity build their community’s resilience through the vaccine programme. In Lothian, the collaboration with the voluntary sector expanded to include the sector in promoting and supporting lateral flow testing at a community level, so this kind of partnership working and investment has longer term, preventative benefits for public health too. VHS research briefing: Reducing Inequalities One Vaccine at a Time, April 2021: https://mk0voluntaryheaenrww.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Research-Briefing-Reducing-Inequalities-One-Vaccine-at-a-Time-April-2021.pdf Overview of the Lothian partnership model: https://vhscotland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Edinburgh-TSI-role-re-vaccination.pdf VHS article for Glasgow University: the necessity of an inclusive vaccine in tackling covid-19 inequalities, and the role of the voluntary sector: https://policyscotland.gla.ac.uk/vaccine-inclusion-reducing-inequalities/
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