Embracing a community’s practice to promote the measles vaccine | Penn Today

…during their fall semester abroad in Jerusalem, they used their background and what they’ve learned in nursing school to create an outreach program promoting the measles vaccine geared at an ultra-religious Jewish group called Haredi. Because many in that community get their news from black-and-white posters called pashkevilim hung around the neighborhood, the Penn students decided to make one.

“In Jerusalem, there is a huge measles outbreak. There were 2,690 cases of the measles in 2018 alone, which is a huge increase from the fewer than 40 cases in 2017,” Shapiro says. “We had visited some of the well mother–baby clinics and we saw how they worked, but we couldn’t do all that much during our clinicals. We decided to address this outbreak” in a different way.

Doing that meant meeting the community where they were, both literally and figuratively.