ABSTRACT
Health communication contributes to improving the public’s health through public education campaigns that create awareness, alter the social climate, change attitudes, and motivate individuals to adopt recommended behaviors. Campaigns traditionally have relied on mass communication (such as public service announcements on billboards, radio, and television) and in the form of printed educational materials such as pamphlets and fact sheets. Other campaigns have integrated mass media with community-based programs. Health communication supports community-centered prevention, which shifts attention from individual to group-level change and emphasizes the ability of communities and the individuals comprising those communities to effect change on multiple levels. Increasingly, health promotion activities take advantage of digital technologies, such as the World Wide Web to target audiences, tailor messages, and engage people in interactive, ongoing exchanges about health. The fairly new technique of tailored health communication offers individuals health information and behavior change tips based on their unique characteristics. An entire chapter of
Healthy People 2010
is devoted to examining the role of health communication for individuals and for the community. As for individuals, health communication determines relations between patients and health professionals; affects exposure to, search for, and use of health information; and influences adherence to clinical recommendations. In terms of communities, health communication shapes the construction of public health messages and compaigns and the dissemination of population risk communication messages. Health communication in the community can be used to influence the public health agenda, advocate for policies and programs, promote desirable changes in the socioeconomic and physical environment, and encourage social norms that benefit health and quality of life.
