Poetry and Prose: How a Health Humanities Approach Can Improve Public Health Communications

Background:  Traditional approaches frame public health communication largely as a mono-directional activity in which experts identify target audiences for appropriate messages and evaluate resulting behavior change. The goal of involving community members is often to increase effectiveness of the messages by pilot testing language and situations recognizable to the target group. However, a changing media environment requires new strategies to educate public health professionals on ethical and effective communication. The blurring of lines between citizen and journalist, the growing recognition of the power of personal stories in public health advocacy and accessible new technologies require new pedagogical approaches for training public health communicators. Health humanities—medical humanities adapted to non-clinical health professionals—offer a transformative model for enhancing graduate education in public health communication.

Program background:  The Master of Public Health Program at the University of Missouri offers a dual journalism/public health degree and is pioneering a health humanities approach in public health communication. The principle of narrative competence (Charon, 2001) is explored in core courses and the course Storytelling in Public Health and Public Policy (one option in a menu of required health communication courses) challenges students to examine communication interventions in light of traditional humanities themes, such as aesthetic value, memory and literary point of view. This approach is particularly relevant as public health professionals increasingly confront complicated ethical questions in storytelling and health communication.

Evaluation Methods and Results:  The program assesses student mastery of explicit communication competencies, tracks the effectiveness of MPH students and graduates in placing opinion pieces in the popular press and measures the impact of perspective-taking interventions on student understanding of the interaction between health equity, social context and health communication. Our graduates report increasing competence in health communication and are succeeding in a variety of public health communication efforts (including international initiatives in public health storytelling). Further, they exhibit a broader understanding of the ethical dimensions of public health communication as a result of these interventions. At the close of spring semester 2016, the MPH program director will conduct interviews with students/graduates who participated in the creative writing intervention in the capstone and/or public health storytelling course to explore themes related to self-knowledge and bias, health behavior attribution and application of this training to health communication objectives in the workplace. The results of these interviews will be summarized and reported in August.

Conclusions:  Health humanities strategies enhance graduate public health education in health communication both by improving students’ narrative skills and by encouraging deeper reflection on ethical questions in storytelling, including ownership/exploitation, representation and consent.

Implications for research and/or practice:  Increasingly, graduates of MPH programs and practicing public health professionals will be involved in health communication efforts that involve storytelling, that create or conform to narratives about marginalized or at-risk populations and that push the boundaries of existing ethical frameworks in journalism, medicine and public health research. Extending medical humanities and narrative medicine into the realm of health communication will facilitate deeper engagement with relevant questions raised in the humanities and enhance the ability of practitioners to convey compelling messages on health topics.