Call for Papers: Family & Community Health Journal's Special Issue on CBPR

I got this in an e-mail today and figured it couldn't hurt to spread the word a bit about this special issue of Family & Community Health.



The interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal Family & Community Health will produce an issue on community based participatory health (CBPR). Articles are due by September 1, 2009 to Issue Co-Editors Elnora (Nonie) P. Mendias and Elizabeth (Liz) Reifsnider at the University of Texas Medical Branch School of Nursing in Galveston, Texas. Please submit manuscripts for consideration electronically to nmendias@utmb.edu and elreifsn@utmb.edu.

Articles are being solicited on CBPR topics as follows:
* CBPR and policy
* Building CBPR infrastructure
* CBPR and environmental health
* Building community partnerships for CBPR
* Using CBPR with vulnerable populations
* CBPR research
* Examples of research using CBPR
* Evaluation research using CBPR

Family & Community Health (FCH) focuses on healthcare practitioners regardless of area of practice. The journal's common goal is to provide a forum to discuss a holistic approach to family and community healthcare and primary healthcare, including health promotion and disease prevention. Each issue of FCH focuses on a specific topic that can be used by faculty, practitioners, and students in a range of healthcare disciplines.

FCH is indexed in the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature (CINAHL); Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences; Research Alert; Social SciSearch; Family Studies Database; Health Promotion and Education Database; Cancer Prevention and Control Database; Nursing Abstracts; Psychological Abstracts; PsychINFO; PsysLIT; Journals@ovid; Sociological Abstracts; Social Planning/Policy & Development Abstracts; MEDLINE; MEDLARS; and Index Medicus.

For further information about the journal or to access the Author Guide on the Family & Community Health website at http://www.familyandcommunityhealth.com.

Menu Labeling: Does Providing Nutrition Information at the Point of Purchase Affect Consumer Behavior?

Last month RWJ put out a report on how menu labeling affects consumer behavior. The full report is available as a PDF here. I haven't had a chance to read the entire report yet, but one of the initial bullet points quickly caught my attention:

Most consumers would like to see nutrition information at places where they go out to eat; however, only limited research has explored how well this information is understood by consumers and which consumers may be most likely to use menu labels in making decisions about what to purchase.

I'd never considered this as another context for some of my own work related to health literacy, but it likely meshes up pretty well with some of my other interests and the interests of students in advertising. For anyone interested in the communication of health information, I think this report will have some good information and useful references, too.

FDA Warnings and Mental Health Stigma

The New York Times had an article yesterday about the FDA requiring black box warnings on Chantix and Zyban, anti-smoking drugs from Pfizer and GlaxsoSmithKline respectively.

From the article:

Federal drug regulators warned Wednesday that patients taking two popular stop-smoking drugs should be watched closely for signs of serious mental illness, as reported suicides among the drugs’ users mount.

There is certainly an argument to be made that DTC drug advertising can help reduce stigma around certain conditions, including mental health issues. I think there are a variety of reasons this might happen, if for no other reason than running ads for drugs to treat depression on major television networks has to communicate that a lot of people might be interested in those drugs.

Reading the NYT article, I’m left wondering how black box warnings for drugs like Chantix and Zyban work in the opposite direction. As the media covers this issue (which they should), people are going to be reading about side effects (serious mental illness) that have resulted in these stronger warnings. Does that contribute to the stigmatization of mental illness? I don’t know, but it seems like an interesting question worth a bit more study...

Call for the Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award

Description. The Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award recognizes a significant and original contribution, in the form of a monograph, book, and/or program of research, to the study and application of the field of Health Communication.

Nomination Criteria. There are five nomination criteria. The scholar’s work must have: (a) a significant and long-lasting effect on the field of Health Communication; (b) strong heuristic value; (c) influence over others’ work; (d) originality regarding theory, research, and/or practice; and (e) contributed to the development of Health Communication as a distinct field of study.

Nomination Procedure. Although nominations are open to anyone who has made a significant contribution to the Health Communication field, preference is given to members of ICA’s and NCA’s Health Communication Divisions. Nomination packets include: (a) A single, detailed letter of nomination addressing the aforementioned criteria; (b) the scholar’s vita; and (c) the single most influential or representative piece of work from the scholar. Self nominations are encouraged.

The deadline for nominations is July 31, 2009.

Send nominations to:
Jeffrey D. Robinson
Rutgers University
Department of Communication
4 Huntington St.
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
jrob@scils.rutgers.edu

Costly Care in a Texas Town

I saw this pop up in the news quite a few times in the last week or two, but probably the best radio show I heard was OnPoint's story about Atul Gawande's trip around the country to look at the reasons behind varying healthcare costs. This particular show was probably best because Gawande was actually a guest, instead of most other shows I heard where they were just discussing his story and the buzz it generated. Toss in the cardiac surgeon from McAllen critical of the healthcare system in the town and you have a great 45 minutes of radio.

I'm going to have a chance to re-teach a Health Communication in the Media course this fall for UT freshmen. It's a great little seminar class limited to a small number of students. I had a blast teaching it last fall, so I've been looking forward to Round 2 ever since. A story like this presents an interesting counterpoint to a show like House (where every patient gets a trillion medical tests) instead of the situation Gawande describes where incentives can encourage doctors to practice defensive medicine or order tests that make more money for a practice.

OnPoint is almost always good, but this show was particularly excellent.

Colored Blocks for Likert Scales

I was reading an article today as part of a journal club I'm in (I lead an exciting summer life), and I came across something that was new and interesting to me. The authors of this study used colored blocks as a visual aid to support Likert items in a survey with lower literate audiences. I'm going to track down some more details on how this worked, but this was a little different than other strategies I've seen for lower literate audiences, and something I suspect I'm going to use in the future. The article is:

Bernal, H., Woolley, S., Schensul, J. J., & Dickinson, J. K. (2000). Correlates of Self-Efficacy in Diabetes Self-Care Among Hispanic Adults With Diabetes. The Diabetes Educator, 26(4), 673-680.

The study itself was interesting, of course, but that particular methodological detail just struck me for some reason.

Interesting Intervention and Article

I wanted to draw a bit of attention to a cool article I ran across while working on the literature review for an article. The citation is:

Primack, B. A., Bui, T., & Fertman, C. I. (2007). Social marketing meets health literacy: Innovative patient improvement of health care providers' comfort with patient interaction. Patient Education and Counseling, 68, 3-9.

As an intervention, the authors taught some medical students about social marketing and health literacy, then had them design health education materials for low health literate patients. The medical students got a lot out of it, plus they ended up with a lot of new health education brochures on a range of topics. I'd love to see how actual low health literate audiences may have responded to these new brochures (especially compared to "normal" materials), but if they've done that work I haven't found it yet.

In any event, this was an interesting article and worth drawing some attention to.

Peer Pressure: Merck + Elsevier

I wrote about this a few posts ago, but NPR: On The Media had a feature yesterday about Merck and Elsevier and their "journal." The story, Peer Pressure, included a couple good interviews and analysis by the On The Media crew. On The Media is one of the best shows on NPR (at least as far as I'm concerned), so I was happy to see they picked up on this particular story. It's definitely worth a listen.

Drug Company Websites

I was doing a little reading tonight and went through a couple studies looking at the websites of pharmaceutical companies. The studies were:

• Griffiths, K. M., Christensen, H., & Evans, K. (2002). Pharmaceutical Company Websites as Sources of Information for Consumers: How Appropriate and Informative Are They? . Disease Management and Health Outcomes, 10(4), 205-214.

• Graber, M. A., & Weckmann, M. (2002). Pharmaceutical Company Internet Sites As Sources of Information About Antidepressant Medications. CNS Drugs, 16(6), 419-423.
  

The first thing I thought upon reading these studies is that some of the methods/results of Internet-oriented studies don't necessarily have the longest shelf life. In one of them they used HotBot.com as a tool for searching the Internet, which I'm pretty sure at this point would be fairly unlikely for most healthcare consumers.

In any case, I think the question about the educational value of pharmaceutical company websites is an interesting one. I have a PhD student who recently collected data looking at what people learn (hopefully) from the Gardasil website, we're just starting to dig into the data right now to see what people thought of the website, what they might have learned from it, etc.

I've never fully grasped when I read research articles on drug advertising when the authors take a combative stance. (I'm not saying either of these articles do that, but I've certainly seen enough of it.) This isn't to say that I necessarily think drug advertising doesn't have some problems, but it seems like good academic research could help improve the quality of drug advertisements. If the end result are better (whatever that might mean) ads that lead to better patient education and compliance, it would seem like everyone wins... Patients learn about their health, drugs to treat health conditions they might have, they're more compliant (aka, increased sales for the companies), and they end up managing their health more successfully.

Anyway, there might not be a real point to this post, just a few random things that came to mind when I was doing a little reading tonight. Here's hoping academics and industry can do a slightly better job working together to improve these ads for the betterment of everyone involved.

Hans Rosling on HIV

One of the highlights at TED each year is Hans Rosling offering another amazing presentation related to public health. This year he talks about HIV around the world, great stuff.