The Roles of Vaccine Education and Trust in Public Health
More Programs and Publications Featuring Dr. Rodney Rohde
In this program:
Vaccine education and trust serve important roles in public health. Medical laboratory scientist Dr. Rodney Rohde discusses ways to build trust at the community level through personal communication and faith-based efforts.
Transcript
Interviewer:
Do you think vaccine education should especially be implemented in these areas, and aside from limited access in these areas, how do we address building trust when resources are actually made available?
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Okay. Yeah, I think absolutely, and I think you could go further. Certainly vaccination education, healthy lifestyle education, how you handle the healthcare system education, there are so many facets to helping people that I think are sometimes not thought about, I think people perhaps like the people I grew up with in a small rural town could benefit from that. Now that I'm not there anymore, I think about that sometimes, like I have certain access because of what I know and my knowledge and my education, and that's not true all the time.
So I think we need to acknowledge that, and we need to really start thinking about how we can help again, our neighbors around us, getting back to community public health, which I mentioned earlier. And it's just going to be important to get in there and do that work, it's not easy work. Again, sometimes I come back to my storytelling kind of phrase, because you have to build trust, you can do harm when you go into communities that you're not part of, and people don't understand you. And so you have to take the time and the effort to work with the community, and perhaps I'm not the right person, perhaps it's someone else that needs to go into that community and someone they trust.
I had a colleague here in my program whose entire PhD dissertation was on diabetes, and he took...interestingly, he took a faith-based approach. He started going to churches because the community he grew up in, that was the place to go, it wasn't the restaurant, it wasn't the school, it was the church. And I grew up in that kind of community. And so he really understood at a ground level, that impact would come from perhaps making alliances with reverends and pastors and other people, and clergy, and gaining some trust, and then sustaining that trust, not going in and then leaving, but setting it up to where it could be sustainable over time and just seeing great results from that, but it took time, it took hard work and effort. And so those types of projects need funding, they need help and support. So we start getting at the grassroots level of disease prevention, it's way easier to prevent an infection than it is to cure it. And so that goes back to the old saying, you definitely want to prevent something versus look for an emergency cure or a miracle cure, because it's just much easier to do that.
Interviewer:
Yeah, and I think people it's...I think it goes without saying, but I think people need to realize that trust is a major, major part of healthcare.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
So big.
Interviewer:
I remember when they started...
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I mean if COVID didn't teach us anything else, right? If COVID didn't teach us anything else...
Interviewer:
Exactly.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
We have to understand that trust is at the core, it's people's health, and so you really have to...and it's not easy. You can't do it through an infomercial, you can't do it with a 40-word tweet. You can't do it simply. It takes building trust. And that's...
Interviewer:
A lot.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
I think, the heart. That's the hard work, right? That's a relationship, that's what makes relationships so valuable is you have to build that trust and keep going back to it and forgiving each other when you make a mistake and trying to move forward when you can, because it's just such a difficult job to maintain.
Interviewer:
Right. I remember when they started rolling out the vaccines for COVID, and they kind of made a surplus of them, I think it was certain communities and not just in Florida. But I remember I heard on the news that there was one area where there was…I think it was a few CVSs or something like that, but they had a surplus of vaccines and they couldn't do anything with it, so they ended up expiring and having to throw them away.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Bit crazy.
Interviewer:
Because the people in that community were like, “No, I don't want it.” So it's like even when you have...and I'm even seeing this on the news, I change the channel and then I see in Brazil people are burying people...
Dr. Rodney Rodhe:
That's right.
Interviewer:
Constantly.
Dr. Rodney Rodhe:
That's right.
Interviewer:
They will be fighting for to have this kind of resource, where just kind of those issues that...
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Just, just crazy. I mean that's just crazy. It's mind-numbing. It makes you so angry. I mean, you see not just a few, but thousands of doses being expiring or something, when they could ship that out to, like you said, some other country that could have benefited just...again, that's where I think we need to get so much better. That's just crazy.
Interviewer:
I just wanted to thank you, Dr. Rohde for joining me today to discuss these very important topics, especially that last topic on building trust. I thank you for coming to this Diagnostic Decoded on emerging infectious diseases. This is a very important conversation to have with people.
Dr. Rodney Rohde:
Thank you so much. I really want to take the time to thank Diverse Health Hub. I think this is such a critical movement, science communication, speaking with medical laboratory scientists and public health professionals and others that can really passionately talk about how testing works or how surveillance works or how certain therapies might work. And hopefully this can help us get started on meeting people where they're at and building some of that trust that you talked about, so I look forward to doing this again and again with you, so thank you for having me.
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