Question

Health Promotion Disease Prevention Communication

STEP 1

Investigation Communication Tools

STEP 2

Read the WHO article, Why Health Communication is Important in Public Health

STEP 3

Read Healthy People’s, Health Communication and Health Information Technology

TASK;

In certain countries and populations, or during times of disaster, communication of health promotion/disease prevention is difficult and cannot be easily done with digital media. Develop an infographic or poster of ways of providing health communication other than through digital media.

Answer 1

Health communication includes verbal and written strategies to influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier choices. Health communication often integrates components of multiple theories and models to promote positive changes in attitudes and behaviors.

Effective health communication and social marketing strategies include the following components:

• Use of research-based strategies to shape materials and products and to select the channels that deliver them to the intended audience.
• Understanding of conventional wisdom, concepts, language, and priorities for different cultures and settings.
• Consideration of health literacy, internet access, media exposure, and cultural competency of target populations.
• Development of materials such as brochures, billboards, newspaper articles, television broadcasts, radio commercials, public service announcements, newsletters, pamphlets, videos, digital tools, case studies, group discussions, health fairs, field trips, and workbooks among others media outlets.

Acc. To WHO:-

Health communication is seen to have relevance for virtually every aspect of health and well-being, including disease prevention, health promotion and quality of life. This increase in the prominence of the field, externally, is happening contemporaneously with important developments taking place, internally, one of which is the focus on the study of environmental, social and psychological influences on behaviour and health. Given the global challenges posed by major threats, health communication scholars and practitioners recognize the importance of prevention and, with it, the need to understand human behaviour through the prism of theory.

Communication is at the heart of who we are as human beings. It is our way of exchanging information; it also signifies our symbolic capability. These two functions reflect what James Carey characterized as the transmission and ritual views of communication, respectively.9 Carey recognized that communication serves an instrumental role (e.g. it helps one acquire knowledge) but it also fulfils a ritualistic function, one that reflects humans as members of a social community.

health communication principles in public health presents challenges. First, the evaluation of communication interventions, especially those using national mass media (e.g. radio), does not usually lend itself to randomized trials. Hence, innovative methodological and statistical techniques are required for attributing observed outcomes to intervention efforts. The responsive and transactional nature of health communication interventions also means that modification in intervention content may occur, adding an additional challenge to the evaluation process. Second, the recognition among behavioural scientists – that causes of human behaviour reside at multiple levels that reinforce each other – poses difficulties in designing and testing multilevel interventions. This complexity of health behaviour determinants also requires a multidisciplinary approach for effectively promoting change, which further means that interventions need to incorporate expertise from a variety of professional backgrounds. Finally, because of the rapidly changing communication channels, health communication interventions need to make extra efforts to meet their audiences at their level of technology use.

Purposes of disaster communication include preventing panic, promoting appropriate health behaviors, coordinating response among stakeholders, advocating for affected populations, and mobilizing resources.

A quality improvement project was undertaken to gather expert consensus on best practices that could be used to improve WHO protocols for disaster communication. Open-ended surveys of 26 WHO Communications Officers with disaster response experience were conducted.

to build communications capacity prior to a disaster include pre-writing public service announcements in multiple languages on questions that frequently arise during disasters; maintaining a database of statistics for different regions and types of disaster; maintaining lists of the locally trusted sources of information for frequently affected countries and regions; maintaining email listservs of employees, international media outlet contacts, and government and non-governmental organization contacts that can be used to rapidly disseminate information; developing a global network with 24-h cross-coverage by participants from each time zone; and creating a central electronic sharepoint where all of these materials can be accessed by communications officers around the globe.