First TELLME model building workshop held

One of the outputs from the TELLME project is to be a simulation model to investigate the way in which communication impacts on people’s decisions to adopt protective behaviour such as vaccination or hand hygiene, and hence reduces the spread of an epidemic. The model will codify existing knowledge about different types of communication and their influence and allow users to test out the effect of different approaches.

The reports from WP1 and WP2 and the references they drew from already contain some of this knowledge, but more concrete detail is required for a model. Furthermore, the knowledge spans several fields of expertise including communication, public health behaviour, decision making, risk perception, epidemiology and modelling, and it is important that these be considered together rather than independently. A small group of TELLME partners and other experts in these fields met on 31 July to start the model design. The workshop participants identified important factors in the links between communication, behaviour and epidemiology. They also explored some of the most critical questions about how these links are understood.

The results of the workshop and follow up discussions will be summarised in the model design (to be released publicly in February 2014). The workshop participants are to reconvene once a draft model has been developed to make sure that it reflects that summary in a way that is useful for health authorities and other intended users.