Thinking about how we communicate public health better
This piece was co-authored by Dr Matthew Kreuter and Dr Rachel Garg.
We have written here often about the challenges facing public health, and about the slow erosion of public trust in the field. Those challenges have many roots — partisanship, the inconsistencies of pandemic-era communication, the perception that public health speaks more in the language of values than in the language of evidence. We have taken up several of these elsewhere. There is, however, one further piece that deserves more attention than it tends to get, and it has to do with the story we tell about ourselves.
The dominant national narrative about health is, on most days, a narrative of foreboding. Things are bad and getting worse. Every week brings another headline of imminent risk. That story is not entirely false. Many of our health indicators are indeed troubling, and public health draws much of its public license from sounding the alarm when the alarm is warranted. But foreboding is not the whole picture. Some health problems are getting worse. Others, quietly and with very little fanfare, are getting better. When the public hears only the first half of that story, it shapes how people understand what we do and whether the work is worth supporting.
This matters because public health, more than most fields, depends on a citizenry that believes the work we are doing is effective, is worth investing in. Belief in that proposition is not automatic. It has to be cultivated, and it can be lost. A poll out of St. Louis, recently fielded, captures the problem with unusual clarity.
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