Below are extracts from an article by Steve Hamill, Vice President of Policy Advocacy and Communication at Vital Strategies, and a comment from me.
Full text: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/how-public-health-lost-the-narrative-and...
EXTRACTS
Public health has lost its relevance in the public narrative.
For decades, harmful industries have poured billions into persuasion, addicting people to sugar, alcohol, and tobacco. Public health, meanwhile, has organized around the assumption that evidence alone can carry policy goals...
While our opponents invest in persuasion as a primary tool, public health has largely disinvested in communication as a core infrastructure...
Remarkable voices, from doctors debunking junk science to creators sharing lived experiences, are proving that health can gain traction...
What would it look like to treat communication as core infrastructure — on par with labs, data systems, or clinical delivery?...
Public health must reclaim its identity not just as a scientific enterprise, but as a mobilizing one. It must participate in shaping culture and policy.
COMMENT (NPW): I agree that it is important for public health to invest in communication. But the challenge of improving the availability of reliable healthcare information, and protecting people from misinformation, requires systems thinking to strengthen the global evidence ecosystem, not social media influencers. There are no short cuts.
Furthermore I think that if public health systems are seen by the public to be engines of persuasion, akin to tobacco companies, this approach could seriously backfire and lead to further erosion of trust in science and health authorities. Public health will lose if it tries to play the same persuasion game as big tobacco, big alcohol and big food. I would argue that more needs to be done to build trust and to inform, not to persuade.
What do you think?
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org