Introduction Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia read by millions seeking medical information. To provide health professions students with skills to critically assess, edit, and improve Wikipedia’s medical content, a skillset aligned with evidence-based medicine (EBM), Wikipedia courses have been integrated into health professions schools’ curriculum. This literature review and curricular inventory of Wikipedia educational initiatives provides an overview of current approaches and identifies directions for future initiatives and research. Methods Five databases were searched for articles describing educational interventions to train health professional students to edit Wikipedia. Course dashboards, maintained by Wiki Education (Wiki Edu), were searched for curricular materials. From these sources, key details were extracted and synthesized, including student and instructor type, course content, educational methods, and student outcomes. Results Six articles and 27 dashboards reported courses offered between 2015 and 2019. Courses were predominantly offered to medical and nursing students. Instructors delivered content via videos, live lectures, and online interactive modules. Course content included logistics of Wikipedia editing, EBM skills, and health literacy. All courses included assignments requiring students to edit Wikipedia independently or in groups. Limited details on assessment of student learning were available. Discussion A small but growing number of schools are training health professions education students to improve Wikipedia’s medical content. Course details are available on Wiki Edu dashboards and, to a lesser extent, in peer-reviewed publications. While more needs to be done in conducting and sharing assessment of student learning, integrating Wikipedia into health professions education has potential to facilitate learning of EBM and communication skills, improve Wikipedia’s online content, and engage students with an autonomous environment while learning. Future considerations should include a thorough assessment of student learning and practices, a final review of student edits to ensure they follow Wikipedia’s guidelines and are written in clear language, and improved sharing of teaching resources by instructors.

IntroductionAs of July 2022, a little over one-third of Guatemalans were fully vaccinated. While COVID-19 vaccination rates are not officially reported nationally by racial/ethnic groups, non-governmental organisations and reporters have observed that COVID-19 vaccination rates are especially low among high-risk Indigenous populations. We conducted one of the first studies on COVID-19 vaccine acceptance in Indigenous populations in the Central Highlands of Guatemala, which aimed to better understand the barriers to COVID-19 vaccine uptake and how to improve vaccine promotional campaigns.MethodsIn November 2021, we conducted eight focus group discussions (FGDs) with 42 Indigenous men and women and 16 in-depth interviews (IDIs) with community health workers, nurses and physicians in Chimaltenango and Sololá. Using a participatory design approach, our qualitative analysis used constant comparative methods to understand the inductive and deductive themes from the FGD and IDI transcripts.ResultsWe found three major overarching barriers to vaccination within the sampled population: (1) a lack of available easily understandable, linguistically appropriate and culturally sensitive COVID-19 vaccine information; (2) vaccine access and supply issues that prevented people from being vaccinated efficiently and quickly; and (3) widespread misinformation and disinformation that prey on people’s fears of the unknown and mistrust of the medical establishment and government.ConclusionWhen developing COVID-19 vaccine messages, content should be culturally relevant, appropriate for low-literacy populations and in the languages that people prefer to speak. Promotional materials should be in multiple modalities (print, radio and social media) and also have specific Maya cultural references (dress, food and concepts of disease) to ensure messaging connects with intended targets. This study supports the need for more robust research into best practices for communicating about COVID-19 vaccines to marginalised communities globally and suggests that policy makers should invest in targeted local solutions to increase vaccine uptake.

No abstract

No abstract

ObjectivesTo evaluate the impact of culturally and linguistically tailored informational videos delivered via social media campaigns on COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala.MethodsOur team designed a series of videos utilising community input and evaluated the impact using a pre–post intervention design. In-person preintervention surveys were collected from a sample of respondents in four rural municipalities in Guatemala in March 2022. Facebook, Instagram and browser ads were flooded with COVID-19 vaccine informational videos in Spanish, Kaqchikel and Kiche for 3 weeks. Postintervention surveys were conducted by telephone among the same participants in April 2022. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the OR of COVID-19 vaccine uptake following exposure to the intervention videos.ResultsPreintervention and postintervention surveys were collected from 1572 participants. The median age was 28 years; 63% (N=998) identified as women, and 36% spoke an Indigenous Mayan language. Twenty-one per cent of participants (N=327) reported watching the intervention content on social media. At baseline, 89% (N=1402) of participants reported having at least one COVID-19 vaccine, compared with 97% (N=1507) in the follow-up. Those who reported watching the videos had 1.78 times the odds (95% CI 1.14 to 2.77) of getting vaccinated after watching the videos compared with those who did not see the videos when adjusted by age, community, sex and language.ConclusionOur findings suggest that culturally and linguistically tailored videos addressing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation deployed over social media can increase vaccinations in a rural, indigenous population in Guatemala, implying that social media content can influence vaccination uptake. Providing accurate, culturally sensitive information in local languages from trusted sources may help increase vaccine uptake in historically marginalised populations.