Packed café discusses health communication
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Café Istanbul filled with an inquisitive audience. (Photo by Lucas Newhook)
Health experts should work to inform the public about health issues before a crisis occurs such as the H1N1 pandemic, agreed a panel of health specialists at Wednesday's Café Scientifique.
The three panellists spoke to a packed Café Istanbul in Halifax about the different roles that experts and the media play in communicating health information. The presentation was titled "Too Much Information? Public Health Planning and Communication."
Dr. Scott Halperin and Dr. Joanne Langley, both specialists in infectious disease and professors at Dalhousie University, and Pauline Dakin, an award winning CBC health reporter, presented briefly before taking questions from the audience.
Halperin said his purpose at the talk was to speak about the role of the health expert in health communication. He said that the recent H1N1 pandemic taught health experts a number of lessons, but not all of them were good.
He said that it was a good thing that health experts passed on information as it came and involved the public in the discussion. This, he said, was why Canada had some of the highest H1N1 vaccination rates in the world.
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Dr. Scott Halperin discusses some of his views on health communication. (Photo by Lucas Newhook)
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Café Scientifique
A public lecture series put on by the Novel Tech Ethics research team, a Dalhousie research group focusing on how technology can and will change our world, and funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.
However, he said that a troubling new change is that many health experts have started speaking like politicians. He stated that an increasing number of experts are not answering direct questions, which means that the public is not necessarily getting the message they need to hear to make informed decisions.
Langley said that there have been many improvements in communicating health information to the public. She commended health experts for examining so many different aspects of the pandemic. However, she said too few had their reports made public. Without being released the reports do no good for the public.
She also said that health experts struggle when speaking to the public. While health experts usually have to give advice on an individual basis they have to effectively translate their advice into much broader terms when speaking to the public.
Dakin said that it is important for health experts to communicate to the public because of the difficulties communicating through the media. She said that in the media everything is very much about asking, "What do people want to hear in a minute and thirty seconds?" The answer, she said, is rarely the statistical significances and "p-values" that are so important in science.
Another Café Scientifique presentation will be held on Feb. 23 titled "Stories and Facts: How Should Media Present Medical Science?" The presentation will discuss how journalists reporting on medical science can fill both a positive and negative roles.
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