Enquiry: Supporting Vaccine Uptake Decision-making in Residential Services
摘要
During the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic in 2021, I was asked to provide internal consultancy alongside a health professional colleague in a publicly funded service for adults with intellectual disabilities in Ireland. The consultancy centred around developing guidance to be used by healthcare staff to support service users who were undecided about the Covid-19 vaccine. This guidance needed to be underpinned by the Assisted Decision Making (Capacity) Act (2015) (ADMA) which specified that everyone has the right to decide, with support if needed, whether to take the vaccine, including the right to make a decision that others may consider unwise. The work evolved into a second phase where we developed social stories as a behavioural technique to enable service users to ‘practice’ receiving the vaccine. In this chapter I will focus specifically on the process of enquiry which involved gathering information to enable us to balance the various stakeholders’ perspectives, ranging from the service user, healthcare staff and families, the organisation, and us as consultants whose intention was to embed the consultancy in a rights-based approach. I will reflect on how this consultancy could have been more formally evaluated and how scope creep might have been managed differently.