HCV CHIM Community Advisory Committee

Five members attended. In alphabetical order: Matthew Bonn, Jake Eberts, Thomas Smiley, Carolina Reid, Jennifer van Gennip. Karen Campbell, Assistant Professor of Nursing at York University, participated as a non-voting observer.

Introduction

Members introduced themselves to Matthew Bonn, whose membership was approved over email in between this meeting and the previous. Members agreed that an alumna, Caroline Pugh-Roberts, could rejoin this year if she desired.

Members reviewed study updates sent by the study team.

Qualitative Study

Karen Campbell introduced the purpose and goals of a qualitative study related to the Board, with the immediate goal of yielding a presentation or poster at the European Association for the Study of the Liver meeting. Campbell said that general plan was to examine study meeting minutes and observe meetings to get a sense of how the CAB operated so that other researchers can learn about how the model might be useful for them in the future. Several members suggested that members who are willing be interviewed individually for added context.

CAB Expansion

Members discussed whether expansion of the Board may be necessary or advisable, and if so, what sort of additional perspectives might be relevant. Names are pseudonymized below.

• Alpha: I feel like 1-2 new members could be doable. Good but not absolutely necessary, though I recognize that my perspective might be limited. Would be worried about selecting candidates who are not so proactive.

• Beta: Action Hepatitis Candidate has their five priority populations + one age cohort. We want to avoid headhunting for specific populations for box-checking purposes, but if they can manage to be proactive about it, it could be nice. 

• Gamma: We do want to avoid headhunting/box checking. I think we could cover the five priority populations, and there may be some people in our networks who could offer multiple perspectives. 

• Delta: It might be interesting to hear from people with Hep C on this as well. Especially people from countries with high prevalence; there may be different attitudes towards vaccines, etc. that might be important to capture. So recent immigrants or people with experience there might be good, and that’s the perspective we do lack. 

• Epsilon: I agree with the “good but not necessary” framing — every once in a while I do think like, “do we need somebody from Toronto?” when wrestling with questions about the study logistics for example. (But maybe we already have this covered as well.)

• Alpha: This does touch on the question of what we are responsible for as CAB — e.g., can we really influence vaccine uptake downstream? Does bringing in a new member reliably alter that chance?

• Delta: I agree, though I think ensuring transparency in the process is part of that, and that’s what the role of [Nonprofit] is here. 

• Zeta: Often times when the board gets bigger than 8 it gets hard to manage, harder to just get work done, people back out and don’t voice their opinions as strongly, etc. And we do want to avoid be tokenistic, too. We can invite people one-off if there are perspectives missing, too. 

• Alpha: Given that, I am a little hesitant to do more than one person who is super compelling.

• Gamma: I don’t think you want it too big, but you do want to get diverse viewpoints.

CONSENSUS: An additional member with a compelling profile could be good, especially if they can cover perspectives we don’t have or are weaker on (e.g. newcomers and immigrants, which we don’t have any representation from at the moment) but we’re sensitive to getting too large and the downstream inefficiencies that might carry. 

Logo review

The board felt that the focus on the liver in logo A might be obscure (not many people know what it looks like). Overall, four members personally preferred logo C, and one preferred B.

A:

B:

C: