Risk Communication and Community Engagement for COVID-19 Contact Tracing: Interim Guidance

"Without strong trust between affected communities and public health and other authorities responding to an emergency, the response will be severely hampered or will fail altogether. This guiding tenet applies in all areas of the COVID-19 response, including contact tracing."

Contact tracing - the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease - is a key element of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s recommended approach to control the spread of COVID-19 by breaking the chains of human-to-human transmission. From the WHO Regional Office for Europe, this document provides concrete and practical guidance for health authorities at all levels on how to ensure risk communication and community engagement (RCCE) is properly included in contact-tracing efforts in the context of COVID-19 so as to increase compliance with these efforts. It also includes practical resources, such as RCCE templates, tools, materials, and capacity-building resources, to operationalise and embed RCCE into country-level contact-tracing activities (see Annexes 1 and 2).

As detailed here, in contact tracing, as in the pandemic response overall, effective RCCE ensures that:

• trust is maximised between responders and key audiences;
• communities, especially those that are marginalised, are included and at the heart of planning, implementation, and evaluation of response efforts;
• people have the information they need to make decisions about their health;
• feedback and listening data from the community are used in designing solutions; and
• health-protective behaviours are maximised.

The guidance in the document is based on the understanding that, in contact-tracing work, interpersonal trust must be earned/established, maintained, and/or strengthened between contact tracers on the one hand and contacts on the other. There are four main determinants and four questions that help clarify how trustworthy contact tracers will be perceived by (possible) contacts:

1. Empathy and caring: Does the contact tracer understand me and my situation?
2. Honesty and openness: Is thecontact tracer telling me the truth and not hiding information?
3. Dedication and commitment: Is the contact tracer acting primarily to safeguard my health?
4. Competence and expertise: Does the contact tracerhave the required skills to complete the job?