‘The response is like a big ship’: community feedback as a case study of evidence uptake and use in the 2018–2020 Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

The 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) took place in the highly complex protracted crisis regions of North Kivu and Ituri. The Red Cross developed a community feedback (CF) data collection process through the work of hundreds of Red Cross personnel who gathered unprompted feedback.

This study aimed to understand how this new CF system was used to make operational and strategic decisions by Ebola response leadership. It concludes that CF data collection has both instrumental and intrinsic value for outbreak response and should be normalised as a critical data stream; however, a failure to act on those data can further frustrate communities.