Weaving a public health network: Process and results from an evaluation of CDC's Prevention Research Centers Vaccine Confidence Network.

As part of its COVID-19 pandemic response, in April 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded 26 university-based Prevention Research Centers (PRCs) with a one-year award to raise vaccine confidence, demand, and uptake in diverse communities. The PRCs formed the Vaccine Confidence Network (VCN) to share information, resources, and strategies, and to collaborate. To support the VCN, CDC organized and facilitated numerous network activities, including hosting 14 virtual network meetings, a Slack channel, a resource library, and 4 office hours, disseminating 52 editions of a newsletter, and responding to 172 technical assistance requests from PRCs. These efforts aimed to increase meaningful and impactful collaborations over time so that PRCs' work benefited from their engagement in the VCN. We evaluated the VCN using two network surveys, an interim one at 6 months and a final one at 16 months, with 26 key informant interviews conducted during interim reporting to guide final survey tool development. The interim survey asked PRCs to report on the levels of collaboration and impact in their PRC-PRC relationships. The final survey repeated the interim survey's measurement and asked PRCs about the types of collaborations they engaged in with other PRCs, the types of impacts those collaborations had on their work, and how the collaborations came about (their origins). The number of reported undirected connections between the 26 PRCs grew by 72 %, from 53 to 91 between interim and final measurements. The self-reported amounts of collaboration and impact increased over time. The most common type of collaboration was exchange of information, tools, and resources (in 64/91, 70 % of undirected connections). While the most common type of impact was improved design (in 57/118, 48 % of directed connections). Of collaborations whose origins PRCs reported, 86 % (67/78) first connected during a VCN network activity, like chatting in a meeting or in Slack. The VCN example (i.e., its network practices and evaluation) could be useful to funders and self-organizing networks that are looking to enact coordinated responses to emergency and non-emergency public health and other issues.