Enhancing Stakeholder Engagement with Ireland's National Serosurveillance Programme

Background: The National Serosurveillance Programme (NSP) was established in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide enhanced surveillance and monitor exposure to SARS-CoV-2 infection at population level. The data produced informed public health decision-making in the early response to the pandemic, and informed vaccine and screening recommendations over the subsequent years with programme expansion to further diseases, including hepatitis C and measles.

 

Transparency and timely communication with stakeholders including healthcare professionals, policymakers and the general public is a priority for the programme with data published on the NSP’s webpage. While early engagement with the webpage and datahub was strong from 2022 to 2023 with over 120 monthly views it declined significantly in 2024 to fewer than 50 monthly views.

 

Approach: A structured quality improvement (QI) approach was implemented in October 2024 to enhance engagement with the NSP with the aim of increasing average monthly webpage views to 100 by May 2025. Achieving this target would provide evidence of improved reach, awareness, and engagement with NSP activities.

 

A range of improvement science methodologies were applied to achieve our aim, including QI, Design Innovation and Lean methodologies. The Model for Improvement was used, applying iterative Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycles to test small-scale interventions. These interventions included a targeted social media campaign, refreshing the webpage, using QR codes linking to the webpage on conference presentations and re-designing the format of reporting results including the development of infographics.

 

Co-production of infographics with stakeholders was key to the process, this included user stories and feedback on draft versions with policymakers, public health specialists, general practitioners, and the patient and public involvement representatives of the NSP steering committee to inform the design and deliver useful and accessible formats.

Impact was measured using the following metrics: webpage and social media analytics, readership statistics from the HPSC Epi Insight publication, and targeted user feedback gathered through surveys. Each intervention was compared with baseline measures and learning informed subsequent cycles.

 

Results: By May 2025, sustained improvement in engagement with the NSP was achieved, with a median of monthly 80 visits to the webpage compared to baseline of 48.2 visits. The most impactful interventions included a targeted social media campaign which generated 100 monthly views but proved unsustainable due to resource demands, and the infographic launch which stakeholders found highly engaging. A number of interventions failed, including development of a second infographic. However, they failed fast and were very useful for learning.

 

Implications: There is a risk of overproduction in reporting in general in Health Protection. Rather than spending time reporting on every variable and statistic, it is more beneficial to the system to focus on what is the most important information to communicate and reduce the volume of outputs. This leads to more effective decision making and the production of more accessible outputs.

 

These findings support the adoption of user-centred design in the development of future surveillance outputs, tailored to user needs in clear and accessible formats both within the NSP and more widely in health protection.