Disabilities, autism and the COVID-19 vaccination process

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Disabilities, autism and the COVID-19 vaccination process

Delivering under pressure

The remit was to develop courses to support people with disabilities and/or autism to go through the COVID-19 vaccination process. The first course was aimed at the support workers, whānau/family and friends. The second focussed on helping the vaccinators to make the process comfortable and successful. 

Working efficiently and populating existing templates with new content took away some of the pressure of meeting such a tight deadline. Having a strong client project lead was also key to working collaboratively with four different organisations in the mix. 

Race against the clock

Rolling out these modules under such a time constraint was never going to be easy, but we needed to get this over the finish line as soon as possible. Being a community focussed project for an often under-represented part of society, it struck a chord with us. It was ‘all hands to the pump’ and warranted a little extra effort on everybody’s part. 

People at the heart of the project

Every decision the team made put the people we were targeting at the heart of the learning. We challenged our writing style, the terms we used, and how we reflected our diverse culture, which all contributed to the success of the final versions. Continual reflection: “Is this easy to understand?”, “Will this remove stress?”, “Have we written in a diverse and inclusive way?”, “Does our learning module make the vaccination experience less scary?”. The answers helped us to meet our ultimate objective: supporting those taking disabled and/or autistic people through the vaccination process with comfort and confidence.

Responsive and simple

Articulate 360 Rise is in its element in this space. It allowed fast development, the Review tool made it easy to work collaboratively and capture comments quickly, and we could easily respond to the feedback. A well-designed Rise template lets the visuals make the content shine, resulting in a perfect blend of concise plain English text, good visuals and a moderate level interactivity, for maximum engagement.

Process … process … process

What we feel made this project successful was that even in the haste to develop, we didn’t lose our focus on following a robust development process. Yes, we modified it – it’s part of our agile approach to development – but we didn’t drop steps, particularly those steps around quality assurance and that ever useful second set of ‘fresh eyes’.

Playing our part

We strongly believe that vaccination is one way to keep COVID-19 at bay from our shores. As an organisation, Like-Minded have weathered 2020 well and we are very grateful for what that the ‘team of five million’ have done to date. However, it’s a privilege for us to see how our skills have contributed, even in a very small way, to part of the solution.

“We needed to develop an elearning module within two weeks for the Ministry of Health. I wasn’t sure it could be done, but Cathy and the team at Like-Minded delivered. Very easy to work with, collaborative and made our content look great.”

Sean Versteegh,
General Manager Mental Health & Wellbeing,
Explore Specialist Advice NZ

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