CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 118Viral Infections and Outbreaks ResearchPublic Relations and Crisis CommunicationCommunity Health and Development

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 28 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Community engagement in outbreak response: lessons from the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone

Open access
Bedson, Jamie, Jalloh, Mohamed F, Pedi, Danielle, Bah, Saiku, Owen, Katharine, Oniba, Allan, Sangarie, Musa, Fofanah, James S, Jalloh, Mohammed B, Sengeh, Paul, Skrip, Laura, Althouse, Benjamin M, Hébert-Dufresne, Laurent·2020·BMJ Global Health
DOI 10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002145PMC PMC7445350

Published version of a preprint

Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Documentation of structured community engagement initiatives and real-time monitoring of community engagement activities during large-scale epidemics is limited. To inform such initiatives, this paper analyses the Community Led Ebola Action (CLEA) approach implemented through the Social Mobilization Action Consortium (SMAC) during the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. The SMAC initiative consisted of a network of 2466 community mobilisers, >6000 religious leaders and 42 local radio stations across all 14 districts of Sierra Leone. Community mobilisers were active in nearly 70% of all communities across the country using the CLEA approach to facilitate community analysis, trigger collective action planning and maintain community action plans over time. CLEA was complemented by interactive radio programming and intensified religious leader engagement. Community mobilisers trained in the CLEA approach used participatory methods, comprised of an initial community ‘triggering’ event, action plan development and weekly follow-ups to monitor progress on identified action items. Mobilisers collected operational and behavioural data on a weekly basis as part of CLEA. We conducted a retrospective analysis of >50 000 weekly reports from approximately 12 000 communities from December 2014 to September 2015. The data showed that 100% of the communities that were engaged had one or more action plans in place. Out of the 63 110 cumulative action points monitored by community mobilisers, 92% were marked as ‘in-progress’ (85%) or ‘achieved’ (7%) within 9 months. A qualitative examination of action points revealed that the in-progress status was indicative of the long-term sustainability of most action points (eg, continuous monitoring of visitors into the community) versus one-off action items that were marked as achieved (eg, initial installation of handwashing station). Analysis of behavioural outcomes of the intervention indicate an increase over time in the fraction of reported safe burials and fraction of reported cases referred for medical care within 24 hours of symptom onset in the communities that were engaged. Through CLEA, we have demonstrated how large-scale, coordinated community engagement interventions can be achieved and monitored in real-time during future Ebola epidemics and other similar epidemics. The SMAC initiative provides a practical model for the design, implementation and monitoring of community engagement, integration and coordination of community engagement interventions with other health emergency response pillars, and adaptive strategies for large-scale community-based operational data collection.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002145

Cites

28 of 28 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 29 references

1 of the 29 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Restless Development . Ebola response mid-term review, 2015. Available: https://restlessdevelopment.org/file/ebola-response-mid-term-review-pdf [Accessed 4th Apr 2019].

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 101–118 of 118

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Bedson, J., Jalloh, M. F., Pedi, D., Bah, S., Owen, K., Oniba, A., Sangarie, M., Fofanah, J. S., Jalloh, M. B., Sengeh, P., Skrip, L., Althouse, B. M., & Hébert-Dufresne, L.
Affiliations
  • Gates Foundation (US)
  • FOCUS 1000, Freetown, Sierra Leone
  • Restless Development Sierra Leone, Freetown, Sierra Leone
  • GOAL, Freetown, Sierra Leone
  • British Broadcasting Corporation (United Kingdom) (GB)
  • Institute for Disease Modeling (US)
  • New Mexico State University (US)
  • Vermont Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
Corresponding author
Althouse, Benjamin M
ORCID
Venue
BMJ Global Health
Publisher
BMJ
Published
2020-08
Volume
5
Issue
8
Pages
e002145
ISSN
2059-7908 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002145
PMC
PMC7445350
OpenAlex
W3080271465
Cited by
112
References
29
Citations by year
2026: 32 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 9
FWCI
0.59
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • BMJ Global Health (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
  • National Institutes of Health (1P20 GM125498-01)
  • Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
  • United Kingdom Department for International Development
  • Bill and Melinda Gates through the Global Good Fund
  • Age International
  • UNICEF
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Infectious Diseases › Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Community Health and Development
Keywords
community participation, Ebola outbreak response, Sierra Leone, community action plan, real-time monitoring, case referral, community-based data collection, health emergency response
MeSH terms
Disease Outbreaks, Humans, Retrospective Studies, Sierra Leone, Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola, Epidemics

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review