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.