A new kind of vaccination video: It’s your choice

You will have seen many NHS or health videos on social media. Often including a doctor speaking to the camera and this is a really important way for us as NHS communicators to quickly get complex messages out on social media to help reassure people, explain things or encourage people to go for cancer screening, call NHS 111 first or get vaccinated.

What is often missing from these videos is local people and this is something our residents often tell us would help them engage with the content. Involving real people takes time and is not something that is practical in all situations, but is something we wanted to try and do to fill a gap, respond to the insight, and support all the other important vaccine related content out there.

Our new set of vaccination videos reflect a series of real conversations our residents had with local doctors. They’re not about telling anyone what to do, and while they do cover the facts around vaccinations, they were led by the residents involved.

Seeing local recognisable spaces feature in our video content was important to people. We produced the videos with the London Borough of Newham and took doctors from our local hospitals, and local GPs, out to community spaces, parks and NHS venues across North East London and filmed real conversations with local residents. They answered questions and concerns on things like vaccine ingredients and common myths, and why there are so many vaccines and much more.

Vaccination is an individual choice, and these videos aim to equip people with accurate, trustworthy information to make that decision.

We take this same approach with our Bright Start in Life (for pregnant women and young children), Protect Their Potential (for teenagers) and our Winter Wellness (adults) vaccination campaigns, which the videos support. We want to engage and empower people.

The videos have been well received and we are very grateful to local partners for sharing the content as part of their vaccine messaging. They also would not have been possible without our amazing local doctors and residents, whose openness and honesty make the videos a success.

The videos have had over 60,000 views on YouTube so far and have featured as part of a successful online ad campaign where they were viewed thousands more times.

We aim to make our content accessible to as many people as possible, so that our local communities get the information they need. Our videos have now been translated into 9 different languages and British Sign Language.

• Gujarati
• Bangla
• Romanian
• Punjabi Indian
• Punjabi Pakistani
• British Sign Language (BSL)
• Urdu
• Arabic
• Portuguese
• Polish

You can watch the videos and access our translated playlists by visiting the NHS North East London YouTube channel, you can also find the videos on Well Newham’s channel.

You can watch our launch video here: https://youtu.be/bg12rXlU6mY