Health communication: why getting it right impacts us all

In this episode, listeners will hear from four experts who bring their own unique perspective to the topic of health communication — the verbal and written strategies used to influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier choices. Health Communication is a vital part of public health, but in many ways, it’s become more difficult to navigate for public health professionals and the general public over time.
Listen to "Health Communication: Why Getting It Right Impacts Us All" on Spreaker.
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[background conversation]
0:01:12.7 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Population Healthy, a podcast from the University
of Michigan School of Public Health. Join us as we dig into important health topics,
stuff that affects the health of all of us at a population level, from the microscopic
to the macro-economic, the social to the environmental, from cities to neighborhoods,
states to countries and around the world.
0:01:42.9 S1: On this episode of Population Healthy, we'll hear from four experts
who bring their own unique perspectives to the topic of health communication. Health
communication are the verbal and written strategies used to influence and empower
individuals, populations and communities to make healthier choices. It's a vital part
of public health, but in many ways, health communication has become more difficult
to navigate for both public health professionals and the public over time. To start
us off, we have Ken Resnicow, he's a professor of Health Behavior and Health Education
at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and he's an expert in health
communication. First, we ask Resnicow to frame some of the ways we may come across
health communication messages in our daily lives.
0:02:25.8 Ken Resnicow: When you think about across the day, all the various health
messages, it can really add up.
0:02:30.9 KR: So for example, there's what people see on TV and radio, those are ads
that can be both from health organizations, non-profit organizations, or they can
be sponsored health content, like a pharmaceutical company promoting a new drug, they
may have a campaign to raise awareness about that disease. And then we have the print
media, which can be in the large venue, something like billboards, all the way down
to small posters and ads and magazines and newspapers. And then we get into the whole
digital exposures and there's various places people see health information and health
ads, so they can be placed strategically in social media like Instagram and TikTok,
individual researchers or government and non-government agencies can buy time and
place ads in those venues. Also, people often search for health information. It's
one of the most common things we did some studies on searching around COVID, and there
are millions and millions of people who searched for COVID on their own, and often
they'd land at places like WebMD is a very common landing place, the CDC's website,
Mayo Clinic's website, those are some of the big players if you do a health search
where people will land. And finally, your providers, your doctors, your allied health
professionals, chiropractors and podiatrist, they also can provide health messages.
So we're getting hit with messages throughout the day from several angles and several
venues.
0:03:53.6 KR: I would like to divide public health campaigns in two generations. The
first generation, which I think is largely behind us, but occasionally we still see
it was based on the 3Fs, fear, facts and feedback, particularly fear and facts. For
30, 40 years, we really focussed on informing people, empowering people with information.
But in the second generation, which I think began 1980s, 1990s, but is much more intensively
adhered to now, we're really trying to shift from fear and facts to motivating people
by trying to find meaning in the behavior change.
0:04:31.2 S1: Health communicators have certainly learned a lot over the years about
what types of messages work and which don't. Resnicow shares some examples of great
health communication campaigns and the not so great ones.
0:04:44.7 KR: An example of a campaign that most of us agree failed was the marijuana
worse than you think campaign from the early 2000s sponsored by the Office of National
Drug Control Policy.
0:05:01.9 Speaker 3: Marijuana can slow your reaction time and impair your judgment.
Marijuana, it's more harmful than we all thought.
0:05:11.6 KR: Their core message was, you're underestimating the risk of marijuana,
it is much more harmful than you think. It causes car accidents, it causes you to
drop out of school, you're gonna get arrested and get in trouble if you smoke on marijuana.
And what happened in the evaluation of that campaign, it turned out that exposure
based upon pretty rigorous methods, the higher your confirmed exposure, the greater
your intentions to use marijuana, so somehow telling youth over and over again, you're
underestimating your risk, you're wrong, it's much more harmful than you think turned
out to be what we call reactant. It created in the teen a desire to counter or argue
with that, no, it's not as bad as that. That's not my experience. And when you create
counter-arguing, what you're asking the audience member to do unintentionally is defend
marijuana use.
0:06:03.4 KR: So we think one of the ways that campaign failed is it induced counter-argument
in the audience, and the second pathway by which that campaign failed is that it gave
the impression that most marijuana users are heavy users and are "addicted", but that's
not the experience of most youth. So what that did is it established a norm that was
inaccurately negative, it actually gave kids the message that more kids are using
pot than they actually experience.
0:06:31.9 KR: And when you raise perceived norms, you increase use. The more normative
you make a behavior, the more it sends a message to kids it's acceptable and normative.
And we think that campaign also failed because of that, what we call meta-message,
an unintended communication that is received by the audience without intent directly
by the developer of the message. That's an example of, I think, a failed campaign.
Now, I'd like to talk about a very successful campaign called The Truth Campaign,
funded by money initially through the Florida settlement with the tobacco industry,
and then eventually the national attorneys general settlement with the tobacco industry.
0:07:12.0 Speaker 4: Who here would wanna work in a high-paying, recession-proof multibillion
dollar industry once they graduate? Alright, keep them up. Now, who wants to work
in an industry whose products could potentially be responsible for one billion deaths
in the 21st century? Nobody?
0:07:31.2 KR: The Truth campaign created a smoking prevention model that was truly
unique. They decided that they're not gonna get kids to not smoke by scaring them,
we're not gonna talk about health consequences, what we're gonna talk about are what's
important to kids, autonomy, feeling their generation is special, not acquiescing
to White male corporate establishment. So they created a series of campaigns where
they basically made the tobacco industry the villain, not cigarettes, but that the
industry was dishonest, manipulative, didn't care about them, was ruthless. And through
very creative, very high production value ads, they were able to create a very strong
anti-tobacco industry sentiment. And what the research has shown is that that anti-industry
sentiment was strongly correlated with a desire to not smoke, so they really created
a causal pathway that if we could target and create anti-industry sentiment, we can
prevent smoking, and they did it successfully through a series of individual campaigns,
each with a slightly different message, but all focusing on not health effects, but
by smoking, you are acquiescing to the tobacco industry.
0:08:46.9 KR: In general, it requires a diagnostic evaluation of the intervention
targets, that means understanding what we call the drivers or the mediators of the
behavior. In the case of smoking, we know that perceived risk is a very small determinant
of who smokes. On the other hand, normative beliefs, whether or not you feel your
peers are doing it, whether or not your peers think it's acceptable and cool, those
we know are very strong predictors of smoking uptake, therefore those become our intervention
targets. So it usually takes a combination of quantitative research such as analyzing
surveys, supplemented by qualitative research, interviewing, in this case, youth about
why they smoke or don't smoke, or what they think about kids who smoke or don't smoke,
and you combine that quantitative survey data with the qualitative deeper dive data,
and usually you take those two sources and you create a causal model and you decide
what are the intervention targets we want our campaign to address.
0:09:50.3 S1: And then came the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the myths and disinformation
that was added into the mix, COVID made health communication an already difficult
tasks even more grueling.
0:10:01.7 KR: When it comes to understanding COVID messaging, I'm gonna talk first
about vaccine uptake, but we also could apply this to other COVID protective behaviors
such as mask wearing. It's important to understand there's different audience segments.
In effect, there are two different vaccine hesitant groups, there's the wait and see
group, that's the group that said, "I'm considering it, I'm not against it, but I
wanna see more people take it, I wanna make sure it's safe, I wanna make sure there's
no nefarious purposes, but if my questions are answered, I'll consider taking the
vaccine." Then there's another group that has really been a public health challenge
called the Hard No group, that group has said, "Under no circumstances will I get
this horrible vaccine, it's unsafe, it's unproven, it's part of an attempt to control
us, to poisonous us, it's part of this broader conspiracy generally from the public
health left," which is a new phenomena that public health is seen as political, that
Hard No group has not been messaged very well.
0:11:05.9 KR: I think we've done a really decent job with the wait and see group,
and in fact, the percent of America that has been in the wait and see category has
dropped by more than half in the last year since vaccines became available, but the
Hard No group hasn't budged. How to message that group is really challenging, and
we haven't met that challenge yet. We've come up with some ideas, and there have been
some interesting campaigns out there trying to circumvent that autonomy argument by
saying, "You're right. You don't need a vaccine. You're strong, your immune system
is great, but your grandmother living with you might because she's vulnerable." So
this idea of the protector model is something we've used and others have used in some
smaller campaigns, not so much nationally, but I think that addresses the fact that
the anti or Hard No persona still might wanna protect their family even if they don't
wanna succumb to the left, pharmaceutical conspiracy. This gives them and out, it
preserves their dignity and their autonomy while still giving them a motive to get
vaccinated. But again, I don't think we've done a superb job at counter messaging
the Hard Nos, and it's something over the next year or two is gonna be a challenge
for us, and many people are working on that sticky problem.
[music]
0:12:31.9 S1: Some of the very people working on the sticky problem of vaccine uptake
include health communicators within county health departments. Susan Ringler Cerniglia
is the Communications and Health Promotion Administrator and the Public Information
Officer at the Washtenaw County Health Department in Michigan. She's also an alumna
of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. To understand more about what
it's like to be a health communicator during a public health crisis, we asked her
about her experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, and why communicating during a
crisis is inherently challenging.
0:13:02.3 Susan Ringler Cerniglia: First and foremost, information and how we process
that in a crisis can be very different. We might be feeling particularly anxious,
threatened by whatever's happening. And that level of stress can make it difficult
to understand, to remember, to really absorb what you're hearing. And that, of course,
can be magnified if the information that you're hearing is inconsistent from different
sources, even subtle changes in that might cause confusion, might be difficult to
wrap your mind around the actionable details. We unfortunately also live in a time
where we're absolutely inundated with information, and that amount of information
has really changed over the course of our lifetime. We've gone from having, for example,
daily local newspapers where there was really a professional staff. Overall, we're
now in this time where there's lots and lots of information, we can't necessarily
rely on accurate information coming to us, we have to be individually more proactive
in discerning and where we're getting that information, whether or not it's reliable.
It puts a lot more pressure on the individual. Communications, of course, don't stand
or operate independently, for example, if we're sharing early in the crisis, we're
sharing a lot of information about the situation, what are we seeing in terms of impact,
in terms of data, statistics, where are we seeing the impact?
0:14:41.3 SC: What is the actionable information that I need to do something? Information
isn't gonna be received by everybody in the same way in our diverse communities, and
often in our communities that for whatever reason, may not be able to be proactive
in terms of time or Internet access and really go to those official sources for information.
So you have to have multiple systems to get information out, and we've tried very
hard to build our partnerships and our networks, fanning out from, obviously, our
staff, our elected officials, our local municipalities and our community partners
to really try to get that information out to people through those trusted organizations.
Prior to the pandemic, we've been doing a lot of work in engaging communities. We
had a network of community leaders that were identified through a process of data
and community health assessment to really focus in where we knew health disparities
were high, access to traditional information or health opportunities might be low,
or it was low in many cases, and we built relationships with some of those leaders.
So we were fortunate in the beginning of the pandemic to really be able to rely on
them, and then of course, as the pandemic unfolded, we had this shut down essentially,
and service delivery change everywhere, so it became incredibly important for us to
rely on those networks and to really push reliable and up-to-date information out
in as many channels as we could.
0:16:31.8 SC: A couple of the things we did, for example, was make sure that we were
always creating written information, as simple and as up-to-date as possible and getting
that translated as quickly as possible. Food distribution, you might recall, changed
very dramatically. Food pantries weren't necessarily open, and schools, as they were
closed down, shifted to this daily food delivery, and that presented an opportunity
for us to share written up-to-date information with vulnerable folks. And that wasn't
to say we didn't use more traditional means, we had news releases and tons of media
interviews that were happening as things unfolded and we would share those, of course,
with our staff, our elected officials, our partner lists, and also push out information
and adjust information based on what we were hearing from our community partners and
contacts, and that foundation really served us well as we moved through the different
phases. 'Cause some of the characteristics of each of these phases, and of course,
overall, we had this long response. Unlike most emergencies, health emergencies tend
to be longer in duration, and you really have to deal with information in a different
way because it's not a matter of a immediate explosion and an aftermath, it just keeps
going and going.
0:17:58.3 SC: Fast-forward to vaccination, same idea; limited supplies, and really
working to get that out where we knew access was different and harder, and information
might be harder to come by. Of course, that was also, I should add, combined with
higher impact. The pandemic is quite obviously highlighted existing fragments both
in the public health system and in the healthcare system, and then people's underlying
health. We've seen our communities of color, particularly our Black and Latinx communities
locally, be impacted to a greater degree. We've seen that geographically and in areas
locally, and so really using that data to bring resources as equitably as possible
and as soon as available to those areas was critical, but we couldn't do that necessarily
with the staff that we had at the health department. So again, those partnerships,
and that work to both fan out information and to situate resources in communities
where they're most needed was incredibly critical throughout the pandemic and remains
critical.
0:19:17.0 SC: We saw this in the pandemic, for example, there was a lot of demand
for incredibly nuanced information or an expectation that we had oodles of people
researching questions and establishing data or even going out and enforcing mandates,
for example, but that's really not what happens at local public health. We're not
a research organization. We are set to provide guidance and guidelines, and that can
be hard for folks to understand the role of local public health when we have a situation
like this, and hopefully we'll come out of it with a better understanding of the critical
need for that investment and what we can accomplish if we're truly proactive and have
a robust public health system in place.
[music]
0:20:20.5 S1: Next, we'll hear from Scott W. Campbell, a Professor of Communication
and Media at the University of Michigan, his research examines how people use social
media in their everyday lives and what benefits or consequences those habits might
have. Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic began, Campbell and his colleagues set
out to identify links between an individual's likelihood to believe false health information
and where they get their news. When the pandemic began and brought with it mis and
disinformation, Campbell and his research team had the opportunity to see some of
the things they were studying play out in real time.
0:20:52.9 Scott W. Campbell: We were able to get national survey data from the United
States and Singapore and Turkey, and we were able to look at people's uses of different
types of media and associate those media uses to various kinds of things, including
misinformation beliefs about health. And we asked people about vaccines and whether
they thought vaccines caused certain things that they don't cause, that we know that
they don't cause, just some basic truth or factual questions about genetically modified
foods; it was another area that we asked them about, and so these are just kind of
scientifically controversial areas that actually we do know factually this about vaccines,
and we do know this about genetically modified foods, and we know that there's also
some other information that's out there that's just not true, and so we ask people
about their beliefs around these things, and what we found was that people who rely
on what we were calling in this study, legacy media, which is mainstream online news
media.
0:21:49.6 SC: So an example in the United States would be like MSNBC or maybe AP,
the Associated Press, or Reuters, one of the wire services, and those are new sources
that have been around for a long time, and those are new sources that we recognize.
They're institutions, right? Then we asked people also about social media as a source
of news, and we found that people that use the mainstream legacy news sources for
news, there was a negative relationship between believing in misinformation, false
information about health and using that as a source of news, and this was across all
of the countries, between the uses of social media as a news source and the alternative
types of websites as new sources about health information and those were positively
linked to believing information that's just not true, and it's very consistent across
the countries, that shows that it's in pattern.
0:22:38.5 SC: Your information tends to be more accurate if you're using mainstream
media, it's the opposite pattern with the other types of media, and we looked at thinking
style, so individual differences in how people process information. In this study,
we're looking at two, one of them is called faith and intuition, and that's where
it... Like it sounds, people rely on their own kind of intuition to interpret information
when they encounter it in the news, and another thinking style that people were high
on that we found called need for cognition, which is just a need for your information
to be very structured and ordered in a certain way for it to make sense to you, so
people who were high on these two different types of thinking styles that had nothing
to do with the link between believing in misinformation and mainstream news, but it
made the situation worse for people that rely on social media and alternative media,
so if you need your information to be very structured and ordered, it tells us that
these sources tend not to do that in a very constructive way, not in a way that translates
into accurate beliefs. The other thing that we might say is that people who rely on
their own intuition then maybe are just more gullible, and that mainstream news, it's
just...
0:23:48.6 SC: It's more vetted, there's more gatekeepers, there's editors, there's
people who are gonna get fired. If a lie generates a bunch of clicks on an alternative
website, somebody's gonna get promoted, if that happens on a credible news site, somebody
gets fired. The Internet has certainly fueled a paradigm shift in terms of the information
ecology out there, and definitely this applies to health information, but before I
talk about the Internet, I wanna say it's not just about the Internet, it's also about
the media environment around us. I wanna point out that there was a policy shift in
the United States in the 1990s that allowed drug companies to advertise directly to
consumers, and so that shift goes hand-in-hand along with the change in our media
environment that partially explains why there is so much more information that is
out there targeted for individual consumers as compared to, say, a couple of generations
ago, when we were more in the mass media environment of television, radio, TV, newspapers,
also there were regulations that pharmaceutical companies here in the US constrained
them from reaching out to consumers directly, and they were just having relationships
with doctors, and so that's part of the story.
0:25:00.3 SC: So there is an almost unlimited amount of information that is out there,
and on the one hand, it's good, it's empowering because people have more access to
information, but on the other hand, the nature of that information ranges between
factual and accurate and helpful to absolutely nothing other than persuasive and profit-seeking,
and some of them even goes as far as being malicious, disinformation, intentionally
trying to deceive people, and so it's a wider ecology of information with much more
access to individuals, but you have to have more literacy, I think in this day and
age, not only about the drugs and your health, but also about the media and the sources
of information that we're using to make our choices, unbiased truth in journalism
and in our news, those are ideals. Those... Objectivity is something that you shoot
for.
0:25:52.1 SC: It's not something that you can necessarily fully always get. And so
I think that we have to recognize that economic and social and political forces, cultural
forces and blind spots and constraints and limitations are gonna make it so that we
have to have a diverse range of sources of information so that we can kind of fill
in gaps with a little bit here and there, and check this against that and have our
eyes open about these limitations and still have our trust out there and understand
that it's not gonna get perfect. These are unlimited resources, let's not give up
on the news, we have to diversify our media diet in order to have a more robust vision
of what's out there.
[music]
0:26:38.5 S1: At its core, health communication is designed to reach large audiences,
ultimately, however, the messaging all boils down to an individual's choices, and
what works best for them. This is an area of expertise for Brian Zikmund-Fisher, a
Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School
of Public Health.
0:26:56.0 Brian J. Zikmund-Fisher: I'm an expert in the psychology of medical decision-making,
and in particular, I study how to make the data of health, whether that's re-statistics
or test results, those kinds of data more intuitively understandable to patients,
to policymakers and to the public more generally, so that they can use that information
to make better health choices.
0:27:17.0 S1: Zikmund-Fisher has some ideas on why communicating to patients can be
difficult.
0:27:23.3 BZ: So there's two big reasons why communicating health data to patients
or the public is so hard, the first is, lots of the data that people need to understand,
involves risk, chances, probability, uncertainty. It's just simply the case that risk
is a really un-intuitive concept for most people, so we're having to talk to people
about things that they don't really understand conceptually, but they have to understand
in order to make good decisions.
0:27:50.2 BZ: The second reason is that all of the data of health, unless you're a
health expert, a public health official or a doctor, these data are things you don't
generally think about in your day-to-day life, I don't think about electrolyte levels
or concentrations of chemicals in my day-to-day experience, but if I have to make
a decision, that's dependent upon that data, I'm gonna need help, in order to be able
to make sense of the data, even if I have it available to me. So let me give you an
example of a personal situation that happened to me that really brought into sharp
relief this problem of, you can have data, but you don't necessarily know what it
means. When I was in high school, I had a routine blood test drawn and it came back
with a platelet count of 45, I won't even bother giving you the units. If I just pause
there, I suspect, you don't actually know what that means. Is that good? Is that normal?
Is that bad? It's just 45. Now, I know, because I've researched about platelets, normal
levels are from 150 to 400, and so 45 is significantly below normal, I also know that
if you get down below 10, you're in imminent danger of bleeding internally and dying
from that, so 45 is better than that.
0:29:08.3 BZ: But it's obviously not normal, and I needed that contextual information
to be able to make sense of what was a piece of data that I had available to me, but
that I had no ability to understand what it meant without that extra information.
So in high school, I went through a bunch of tests. But we didn't really figure out
what was happening, and then 13 years later, when I was in graduate school, and in
my doctorate, I was diagnosed with something called Myelodysplastic syndrome, which
is a dysfunction of the bone marrow. And what that meant was that my bone marrow was
no longer making blood cells like platelets, or red blood cells, or white blood cells
the way it should. As a result, I ended up having a bone marrow transplant, which
sounds like scary thing, and it is. It's one of the most dangerous procedures that
modern medicine has come up with, you wipe out somebody's immune system, you wipe
out their bone marrow, and then you replace it with somebody else's and hope it takes
because we don't live very long if we don't have a functioning set of bone marrow.
0:30:11.8 BZ: And that meant I was exposed to lots and lots and lots of blood tests.
Lots and lots of risks that I had to face, including literally the trade-off between
my disease progressing and potentially killing me, versus very significant risks of
treatments that also had chances of killing me, and having to make that choice as
someone who was trained in my professional life, about risks and decision-making was
a fascinating exposure to me of the challenges that all of us face when we have to
make difficult medical decisions, when we have to navigate our health risks and environmental
risks in our day-to-day life. I remember a day when I was going through the intake
process into my bone marrow transplant program, and I went into the room with the
physicians and I said, "Hey, I study decision-making, give me data," and they did,
and we draw curves up on the board and then we talked about the numbers, and I came
out of that day still really struggling with what it all meant and how I could make
appropriate decisions, and I remember that day because I also came out of that room
going, "If it's this hard for me, and I have every advantage, in trying to deal with
this problem, how hard must this be for everybody else, who don't have my familiarity
with risks and numbers and processes of decision-making?"
0:31:41.3 BZ: It opened my eyes to the inequities that exist in this space, and then
really started me thinking about how can we design better communications, how can
we train doctors and patients to be better ready for these moments when they happen.
0:31:57.5 S1: So why is it difficult to communicate about health risks and trade-offs?
And for people to make decisions that affect their health?
0:32:03.0 BZ: Risk is just a hard concept, and I mean we, like, all human beings,
we don't like uncertainty. We wanna know what's gonna happen to us. A classic example
of this is vaccination, like what do I want? I want to be protected against, let's
say, seasonal influenza, but it's not perfect, even if I get vaccinated, I might get
the flu, and the vaccine itself has some chances, very small, but they do exist of
causing, say, an allergic reaction. I have to trade off the desire protection against
the influenza versus the chance that the vaccine might cause an allergic reaction
now, maybe that chance is only one in a million people, but if I happen to be the
one who has that allergic reaction, I get it, it's not like it's any less because
only one person in a million gets it, and that's why risk trade-offs are hard, so
somehow, we have to acknowledge uncertainty, know that we can't ever know for sure
what's gonna happen, and then look at the chances, not just in terms of numerical
probabilities, but also in terms of how important is this to you? And it's that integration
of the data of medicine and public health with the values of patients and communities,
that is really what good decision-making needs to be.
0:33:26.9 S1: So if someone needs to make a tough decision about their health, how
can health communicators design communications that will help them decide? And how
can patients advocate for themselves?
0:33:36.2 BZ: The key for anyone who is trying to communicate this type of information,
to patients, to the public, to policymakers, is to be really clear right from the
start, what do they need, experts have lots and lots of information that is not actually
helpful to the public, it's then helpful to other experts, but if we wanna help people
make good decisions in their individual lives or in our society, we really need to
do the work of figuring out what they need. Part of that is access to the relevant
information, and we've seen a lot of effort done to help give people access to their
health information, for example, we now can get direct access to our laboratory test
results by logging on to our hospital's website for most people in the United States,
that wasn't true 20 years ago, and it changed the way in which we got to talk to our
doctors or monitor our own health conditions, we also need to give that information
to people in a format that they can understand, it's not just, Oh, here's the numbers,
but give them that context to help them know what's normal, what's bad, etcetera.
0:34:44.2 BZ: And we need to help them understand how to use this information to make
good decisions, and if that's a patient with diabetes, that might mean talking with
them about how they can use the data to understand how their own health behavior is
leading to better or worse numbers in, say, their blood glucose, if that's COVID-19
statistics, that might be helping them make sense of when the numbers show that there
really is a lot of risk and they need to take more precautions in their day-to-day
life, versus when those numbers show that maybe we can be a little bit more relaxed
and that that would be a reasonable amount of risk to accept in order to do other
things in our life. Again, it's about understanding the users need, we don't have
to be complete, we certainly don't wanna bombard them with a fire hose of information,
clarifying what the user needs is the best thing that we can do to help people actually
be able to accomplish, live their daily lives, and make good policies, that accept
risk, but minimize it. My advice to patients is always, be willing to ask questions,
ask for information if it's not directly available to you, but more importantly, ask
what stuff means. Asking questions like, is that a good number or a bad number? Or,
What should I feel about this? Or how high would this need to be in order for you
to be worried about it?
0:36:08.9 BZ: Those kinds of questions are really powerful, they're certainly useful
when a patient is talking to a doctor, but they're also useful for when we're thinking
about communities, trying to understand the information that's available to them,
say about their environment or the health status of a community. We have a role in
public health to play, to be the stewards of the information that's available to us,
but we can't always know what our audiences understand or don't understand. So my
best advice, again, to anyone who is receiving information is be willing to ask those
kinds of clarifying questions, 'cause you deserve to know what it means.
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0:36:51.9 S1: On the next edition of Population Healthy.
0:36:54.1 Speaker 8: So nurses have been delivering extraordinary care in hospitals,
schools, they've been serving their communities all throughout this pandemic with
really no relief, what that has shown us, is that they are at risk for substantial
burnout, what we call emotional exhaustion, being tired of being in the workplace,
etcetera, I think something that's really important to understand though, is that
these concerns pre-dated the pandemic.
[music]
0:37:25.1 S1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Population Healthy, from the
University of Michigan, School of Public Health. We're glad you decided to join us
and hope you learned something that'll help you improve your own health or make the
world a healthier place. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe or follow this
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for more resources on the topics discussed in this episode, we hope you can join us
for our next edition where we'll dig in further to public health topics that affect
all of us at a population level.
[music]
In This Episode
Ken Resnicow
Irwin Rosenstock Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Ken Resnicow’s work over the past 30 years has focused on designing and evaluating behavior change programs for a wide range of health behaviors, including smoking cessation, weight control, diet and physical activity, medical adherence, youth risk behaviors, and more. Much of his work has involved racial/ethnic communities and underserved populations. Has has collaborated with researchers in over 25 countries and has trained over 1,000 health professionals in Motivational Interviewing in both academic and health care delivery settings.
Susan Ringler-Cerniglia
Communications and Health Promotion Administrator, Washtenaw County Health Department
Susan Ringler-Cerniglia has over 15 years of experience working in communications and health promotion at the Washtenaw County Health Department, just a few miles away from the University of Michigan. Ringler-Cerniglia is also an alumna of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Scott W. Campbell
Constance F. and Arnold C. Pohs Professor of Telecommunications
University of Michigan, LSA, Communication and Media
Scott W. Campbell’s research examines the meanings, uses, and consequences of mobile media and communication in everyday life. His work has been published in the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, New Media & Society, Communication & Society, and many other venues.
Brian Zikmund-Fisher
Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education
University of Michigan School of Public Health
Brian Zikmund-Fisher uses his interdisciplinary background in decision psychology and behavioral economics to design and evaluate methods of making health data more intuitively meaningful, to study the impact of people’s preferences on over- or underutilization of care, and to explore the power of narratives in health communications. Zikmund-Fisher teaches graduate courses that focus on enabling students to communicate health and science information clearly and memorably.