Southampton Covid Participatory Action Research and Champions initiative Evaluation (CoPACT)
Evaluation completed April 2023
Howlett N, and others. A realist evaluation of community champion and participatory action approaches during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Public Health 2024; 12. Available from
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1355944
Complicating Community Connections: A poem written by Amander Wellings and the PHIRST Connect Team
The PHIRST Connect Team would like to thank Communicare Southampton, and their team of staff, volunteers, and community members for their help with this poem, and the wider evaluation. Communicare is a charity that provides practical and emotional support for Southampton residents who are experiencing loneliness and isolation.
What does the evaluation mean for Local Government?
The evaluation provided value to a range of people and organisations. For the public health team and charitable organisations involved it has provided detailed findings about how these programmes worked, who benefitted most, and the best ways to run them going forward. For public health leaders who might fund future programmes it has told them how much each approach costs and how they might best organise the services to maximise benefit. From a research perspective, using the ‘realist evaluation’ approach was a relatively new way of evaluating these programmes. The findings are of interest to researchers and evaluators of public health services because it can be difficult to explore the benefits and challenges of these programmes, as they are complex with many people involved and many moving parts.
What does the evaluation mean for the Public?
The findings from this evaluation have helped to improve local stakeholders’ knowledge about how to work with local communities to improve COVID-19 awareness and encourage vaccination. Understanding how to best manage a peer researcher programme allowed councils to hear community voices and forge future partnerships that can create positive change.
How are the public involved in the evaluation?
Local stakeholders and those involved in peer researcher or Champion programmes were involved throughout the design and delivery of this project, adding their insight to help the researchers answer questions that were important to them. They have also helped with understanding the results of this evaluation and with sharing them.
Lay summary of research
Southampton City Council tried a number of ways to help spread accurate health information during the COVID-19 pandemic and to communicate better with residents about what they needed from public health services. In September 2020, a COVID-19 Champions programme was set up, which involved members of the public volunteering to help share accurate information about how to keep themselves and their families and communities safe during the pandemic. Later on, a Vaccine Champion programme ran which aimed to increase knowledge and uptake of the covid vaccine among groups where rates had been lowest. Vaccine champions could be an individual or an organisation such as primary schools. The champions were volunteers, and the idea was to get a broad range of people to have conversations with and spread key information to their families, friends, social groups, and wider communities. Alongside the champion programmes, a community participatory action research programme was run. This programme involved a smaller group of paid individuals who became peer researchers.
The Southampton Covid Participatory Action Research and Champions Initiative Evaluation (CoPACT) findings have provided lessons for future champion or community participation programmes. It initially helped with continued support for COVID-19, but also for future health and wellbeing programmes that might involve community members. This project used a ‘realist evaluation’, which involved speaking to a range of people involved in organising and running these programmes to get their ideas of how the programmes worked and the benefits that people in the community might have had as a result. By speaking to a range of people and looking at a range of materials, the evaluation aimed to get a full picture of the ways in which the programmes work, the good (or not) things that happened as a result, and how the community and organisations involved played a role.
Research design
- Phase 1: This phase identified how the Champions and peer researcher programmes worked (or not) to produce outcomes (participation/lack of participation from individuals in the community). Initial programme theories were developed.
- Phase 2: These theories or ideas were then tested through interviews with key people and by reviewing documents from each programme. This phase involved speaking to members of the public, programme leads, champions, peer researchers, and community organisations.
- Phase 3: Findings were then refined, with changes needed to the initial ideas about how the programmes worked. Patterns from the interviews and documents were used to produce a set of broader explanations that can apply to other programmes.
Local Government / Partner(s)
Southampton City Council
PHIRST Connect Research Team
Professor Katherine Brown, Dr Neil Howlet, Charis Bontoft, Dr Olujoke Fakoya
*All PHIRST Connect members input into every project
NIHR Funding Award: NIHR135393
Image credit: iStock