Health Communication

When communicating to the public, more than 50% of your credibility depends on whether you are perceived as empathetic and caring. In most communications, your audience will decide this in the first 10–30 seconds.

Health Communication familiarizes public health professionals from a variety of disciplines, including health education, program management, emergency preparedness and others, with concepts and skills for developing and evaluating health communications campaigns. Participants will utilize case studies to explore techniques for formative evaluation, audience segmentation, message development and evaluation. Participants will analyze effective strategies and potential challenges to community preparedness promotion. Pitching health stories to decision makers and the media will also be covered. Specific emphasis in this course will focus on approaches to reaching under-served populations.

Sharon Bogan, Randal Beaton

Objectives

1. Identify strategies for planning, implementing, and evaluating health communication campaigns.
2. Demonstrate capacity to develop health communication approaches for traditionally underserved populations.
3. Develop skills in risk communication by applying concepts.
4. Examine and analyze health communications and other activities that promote community preparedness (for the general public, healthcare providers, disaster response personnel and vulnerable populations).
5. List 3-5 concepts used in health communications that could influence responses to global climate change, new built environments, and communicable disease issues and describe the possible nature of those effects.

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