Question

Which of the following are some things that affect how lay audiences evaluate and process science-based health information?

Answer 1

Ans) National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD):

The objectives for public information and community outreach suggest two broad strategies to reduce health disparities:

(a) ensuring the dissemination of health information to individuals and community groups that are suffering from health disparities

(b) disseminating research-based information to trained medical and public health professionals working with groups that are traditionally underserved to ensure access as well as quality health care.

Steps:

• Continue to refine and operationalize the objectives by the greater specification of intended outcomes and the development of specific measures.
• Be aware of, and sensitive to, the issue of communication inequities in developing any programs of public information and outreach.
• Develop strategic research dissemination plans that address professional groups that work with groups suffering from an unfair disease burden.
• Systematize outreach efforts by clearly identifying sponsors, audiences, messages, partners, channels, and tracking systems. Such systematic efforts can draw from communication science using the suggested planning matrix.
• Work deliberately and proactively in developing programs and initiatives that contribute to the development of science of communication and research dissemination with a particular focus on health disparities.
• Develop a surveillance system for public health communication with a focus on groups that suffer from health disparities. Currently, little information is available on the information needs of the underserved, and what is available is in disparate locations in the federal government or in the private sector. A well-developed system can track health information needs, media use, seeking behaviors, and knowledge of low-SES and minority groups and can contribute to both the science of surveillance as well as program planning.
- To be successful, NCMHD should set aside a budget for both doing and studying public information efforts.
NCMHD can play a lead role in coordinating the disparate communication and outreach efforts by various NIH ICs in their attempts to reduce and eliminate health disparities. Relevant expertise and resources often reside within the ICs, but NCMHD’s coordination may bring synergy to individual IC efforts. Equally desirable is a partnership with other federal agencies, such as CDC, CMS, the Health Resources Services Administration, and AHRQ, among others, and nonfederal and private-sector partners.
The unprecedented advances in engineering and biomedical sciences offer a tremendous opportunity to prevent and treat diseases that have long plagued humans. These advances, coupled with the communications revolution in telecommunications and informatics, offer the potential to intervene along the different stages of the disease control continuum—from prevention to survivorship and end of life—thereby reducing mortality and morbidity due to disease. Yet the persistent inequities in health and the corresponding inequality in communications among different social groups could disrupt the revolution, resulting in the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, in terms of health and information. A national action plan involving careful, systematic, scientific, strategic, and deliberate efforts to address the twin disparities in communication and health could potentially help to fulfill the promise of the revolution to all instead of a few.