Week 6 - Targeting and Tailoring

This week's lecture slides and readings offered a great set "best practice tips" which Public Health professionals could use to bridge the gap between healthcare messages and hard to reach populations or low literacy populations.

I have read statistics on the U.S. population literacy rates countless times over the past few years. Nevertheless, it ceases to amaze me that approximately 50 percent of the U.S. population is functionally or marginally illiterate (reading at or below 7th grade level). As pointed out in this weeks lecture, this is a huge barrier for day-to-day health activities such as taking prescription medication or understanding what types of food are actually healthy/necessary to control chronic diseases such as diabetes.

Again, this weeks lecture topic is an extremely important concept to keep in mind when creating health messages or campaigns. As we know, doctors have limited time to spend with patients. Therefore I think utilizing lay health advisors/Promotoras is a fantastic way to make health information comprehensible to the target audience. Lay Health Advisors are able to relay the health messages to people of a similar background in a culturally appropriate manner.

Another great avenue to promote health information is the use of word-of-mouth communication. This weeks reading and lecture coincided with the book I will be presenting on next week title World Wide Rave. This book focuses almost entirely on word-of-mouth communication. As discussed in class, word-of-mouth communication is proving to be more effective than traditional mass media efforts. Utilizing Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc is an amazing easy (and free) way to spread ideas or health messages. Think about it, we surround ourselves with computers and smart phones almost all hours of our day. Thus, focusing efforts utilizing these technologies is a great way to raise awareness. It is also a great way to find out what questions your target audience has about your product or service and offers an easy way to answer their questions.

Cody