The newly formed Public Steering Group for The Pandemic Institute has held its second meeting, focusing largely on how communities can be empowered during future pandemic scenarios.

The group is formed of 17 members, recruited from across the Liverpool City Region, who will be working with The Pandemic Institute to ensure that the public voice is represented in what we do as an organisation. The meetings are run in collaboration with Glenn Skelhorn from The Thinker Hub CIC, who run community discussion groups focussing on ‘big’ questions and themes. During our initial meeting in January, the group set out the topics that felt most important to them, with the following topics selected for discussion during this second session:

• What lessons can be learned from COVID-19 to better prepare for working effectively with our communities?
• What kind of local structures (with power) need to be developed to gain trust, improving decision-making within our communities?

The session started with a presentation on some of the work already happening in the city, including some funded by The Pandemic Institute. Amina Ismail (Senior Community Mobiliser at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) and Nour Essale (Community Mobiliser at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) gave an overview of the ReCITE project, which blends creativity with healthcare, focusing on building storytelling into community and health systems to address mistrust and promote wellbeing. The project has a wide range of academic and creative partners who work in collaboration to engage people living in Liverpool, Knowsley and South Sefton, and use the power of stories to promote health prevention and mental wellbeing in some of the region’s poorest areas. They also covered the incredible work of the Community Innovation Teams (CITs) who work at the interface between communities and primary healthcare. CITs are local, multidisciplinary teams consisting of primary healthcare providers (PCN and GP practice staff including practice managers, care coordinators, social prescribers, community nurses etc.), trusted community organisations, neighbourhood leads, community champions/volunteers, people with lived experience, creatives, and other stakeholders. Working together, they have addressed and number of issues ranging from breast screening uptake, to understanding COVID-19 vaccine uptake in different communities.

The second half of the meeting was spent in group discussion, with major emerging themes including:

• What is the role of the media in future pandemics?
• Where do people prefer to receive their news from?
• Who will be the trusted source of communications for communities? Can we establish a framework for this now?
• How can we give people the skillset to navigate available information?
• Do we need more holistic, rather than purely medical, messaging during pandemics?
• Can The Pandemic Institute work with existing trusted community organisations to provide accurate information in times of crisis?

The group will continue to meet quarterly, to provide input on current scientific work as well as discuss broader questions around pandemic preparedness and recovery.