ECDC training in the area of vaccination and vaccine hesitancy for primary healthcare professionals

Vaccine hesitancy is increasingly a topic of concern, and empowering health professionals to deal with this is vitally needed. Health professionals, working at the primary healthcare (PHC) level (physicians, nurses, community workers, etc.) are at the frontline of interaction with those that are taking decisions around vaccination such as parents, adolescents and care takers. Some of these also serve as trainers for their peers.
Although all these professionals have a background knowledge and skills on vaccines and immunisation, would benefit from updating this knowledge and acquiring skills to deal with vaccine hesitancy on a daily basis.

Therefore, ECDC is planning to design a competency-based e-learning course on vaccinology and a competency-based blended training course on behaviour change communication about vaccine hesitancy.
The e-learning course will be accessible freely both at the national and sub-national level. The target audience is public health and primary health care professionals.
The blended course will have the training of trainer (TOT) format and will be delivered at the national level. The target audience are public health (PH) or PHC professionals having a training mission or mandate. The nationally trained trainers will then cascade down the knowledge as part of the Member States contribution to this project.

The specific objectives of this call are:
- To collect and collate exisiting data available from recent European projects on vaccinology and vaccine hesitancy with a special focus on training needs assesement and training-related aspects. This includes acquisition of reports not publicly available and liaison with several key stakeholders.
- The contractor will conduct a desk review of the collated data and of available grey literature in order to inform a training needs assessment among representatives of the target audiences about the two training modules: vaccinology and behaviour change communication to increase vaccination uptake. The contractor will also define Personas (in-depth descriptions and well-developed fictional profiles of prototypes of learners in the target audience that share common characteristics, such as their training goals, job responsibilities, educational background or skill level) and to identify their specific learning needs;
- In order to avoid duplication or overlap in the curricula design, and with the aim to highlight possible collaboration with additional external partners, assess selected existing courses on vaccinology and on behaviour change communication around vaccine hesitancy at European and international level to update and complement to scoping work done by ECDC;
- To design a comprehensive curriculum and develop the content material for the training on vaccinology to be used as source material for the development of an e-learning course aimed at contribute to the continuing professional development of primary healthcare professionals;
- To design a comprehensive curriculum and develop the content material for the training on “how to train PHC professionals on communicating with caregivers to address vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccination uptake”, in short: behaviour change communication about vaccine hesitancy. The training format is blended, with face to face sessions and online pre-training activities as well as online post-training activities.