Latest update January 10th, 2025 5:00 AM
May 08, 2018 News
Health communication is a crucial factor in any health care system, since its ultimate aim is to improve health literacy of individuals. Moreover, health literacy represents the cognitive and social skills which determine the motivation and ability of individuals to gain access to, understand and use information that maintain health.
This notion was yesterday amplified by PAHO/WHO Country Representative, Dr. William Adu-Krow, as he addressed the opening of a two-day Ministry of Public Health consultation forum at the Marriott Hotel in Kingston. The forum is one aimed at developing the national communication strategic plan of the Public Health Ministry.
But according to Dr. Adu-Krow, in order to properly reach the target audience [members of the public] by the stipulated timeline of 2022, it is particularly important that simple language, which is understandable to all, is used. “When I say simple language, I mean speaking in persons’ own traditional language…and also in language that everyone can understand; bring it to the level of everybody,” Dr. Adu-Krow emphasized.
As such he pointed out yesterday that the role of health communication in addressing health in Guyana should see information being disseminated in a manner that can be understood by the relevant target group, using dialect understood by that target group for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
In achieving this goal, Dr. Adu Krow committed PAHO/WHO’s continued support to the Ministry of Public Health to ensure that it is able to develop and implement its Communication Strategy and Work Plan in collaboration with other Ministries, private sector organisations and non-governmental organisations with communications units.
Even as he stressed the importance of the Ministry putting key measures in place to improve its performance, Programme Head of the Ministry’s Public Relations and Health Promotion Unit, Mr. Terrence Esseboom said, “…at some Ministries if you get it wrong you have an opportunity to correct it, but we can’t afford to get it wrong, because if we get it wrong people die or they are maimed or something.”
In addition to gaining instrumental support from health professionals the likes of Dr. Sarah Gordon, who has been known to lend crucial health policy expertise to the public health sector, the consultation will also benefit from the knowledge of Director of the Communications Unit of the PAHO Washington D. C. Office, Mr. Kevin Cook.
Cook and his colleague, Leticia Linn, are the key facilitators of the consultation.
“Over the next two days we will be discussing and developing the new Strategic Communications Plan for the Guyana Ministry of Public Health…,” said Cook as he revealed, “with the rapid spread of the internet, mobile technologies, social media, even to the remote corners of the world coupled with the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases, the importance of health communication has never been greater than it is today.”
It is with this in mind, Cook said, that PAHO, like the local Public Health Ministry, understands the need for populations to be equipped with knowledge and information for safeguarding health by making healthy choices.
Health communication, he explained, can also help to mitigate the effects of health disparities and health inequities by delivering health information to the most vulnerable groups and other targeted audience. For this reason, he said, “communication has been a decisive factor in the evolution of epidemics including HIV, polio and Ebola in both positive and negative ways.”
“Communication failures allowed all three of those diseases to spread more rapidly than they would have spread otherwise, however there were also successful communications pertaining to those epidemics which helped contained them at other points in time,” Cook revealed.
As he turned his attention to communications as it relates to HIV, Cook noted that studies have looked at the course of the HIV epidemic in different countries and have shown conclusively that well formulated health communication, coupled with community engagement efforts, was critical to saving lives.
This was especially noticed during the early years of the epidemic when condom use, avoidance of risky sex and sexual abstinence were the only ways to prevent sexual transmission of HIV, Cook noted. But according to him, in more recent years communication has been equally critical to reducing stigma and risky sex and to increasing the uptake of HIV testing and condom use.
“By the same token there is a good case to be made that far too many lives have been lost to HIV because of the failure to sufficiently scale up HIV communication efforts, as well as the failures to apply lessons that should have been learnt about what kinds of HIV communications work best,” Cook said.
Meanwhile, Minister within the Ministry of Public Health, Dr. Karen Cummings during her feature address at the opening ceremony, shared her belief that the consultation comes at a time when the ministry is engaged in numerous health promotion activities across the country. These, she said, are also aimed at sensitising the populace on ways to lead healthy lifestyles and to promote healthy living.
“Indeed it comes at a time as we strive to renew primary health care…,” said Minister Cummings.
In fact, she underscored that the establishment of health literacy through health promotion is essential to realising positive public health outcomes therefore as a Ministry it is important that efforts are made to communicate effectively to realise the desired results.
According to the Minister too, “sustained, strategically, targeted health communication can in great measure avert an outbreak or a crisis if it is carefully constructed and disseminated to its intended target audiences in a timely fashion.”
She highlighted also that “knowing who, what, when, where, why and how to communicate, are timeless communication pillars on which we must base our strategic communication activities.”
The Minister explained that research has shown that properly designed behavioural based health communication activities can have a significant positive impact on health related attitudes, believes and behaviour. She added, “we must increase our efforts to integrate behaviour change as well as risk and crisis communication strategies in our disease prevention programmes and public health campaigns. A well planned and executed campaign can increase awareness about health issues, sway attitudes and perceptions, correct misconceptions or support advocacy efforts”.
She also stressed the need for the Ministry to protect and maintain its image through its communication efforts, even as she noted the importance of good communication internally and with the media.
The proposed outcome of the consultation will see the Ministry being furnished with new tools on how to work on strategic communications planning needed to realise an improved functioning Communication Unit; key recommendations for improving the planning and effectiveness of that Unit in relation to others; a structure of the Strategic Communication Plan for the Ministry and a timeline on how this structure will become the Strategic Communication Plan, complete with the approval of the Ministry’s principals.
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