The Mecklenburg County Health Department is an award winning leader in the developing field of applied Health Communications. As early as 1993, the Health Department had a presence on the Internet and began broadcasting monthly health-related television programs in 1994. In addition to the Telly and NACO Award winning Healthy Connections television program, the Department was also responsible for the creation of the Telly award winner ABLE!, (All Bodies Like Exercise!) an exercise show intended for those over 50. The Department has also created numerous tailored video products, including a Refugee Clinic Orientation video done in seven languages, child-safety seat education videos for pediatricians, emergency department physicians, and general practicioners; a sanitation video for child care workers mailed to over 900 child care centers, as well as English and Spanish versions of a food handling primer created for use in the restaurant industry.
The Department's most recent production is Salud y Vida, a Spanish language health talk show created in collaboration with the Latin American Council of Charlotte to address health issues in our Spanish-speaking community.
Communication is increasingly recognized as a necessary element of all efforts to improve health. The inclusion of the Health Communication Focus Area for the first time in Healthy People 2010 confirms the importance of communication as an intellectual framework, a scientific endeavor, and a set of processes and interventions for health improvement. Communicating about health is also an everyday part of life. Mass media coverage, entertainment programming, and public policy debates are important places for public communication about health.
Health communication can contribute to all aspects of disease prevention, health promotion, and medical care and is relevant in a number of contexts of our lives as individuals, patients, members of families and communities, workers, and civic participants and voters. Thus, health communication is critical for people's exposure to, search for, and use of health information; individuals' ability to reduce or eliminate unhealthy behaviors and adopt healthy behaviors; and individuals' and community groups' ability to make decisions about the health of their workplace, their community, and our society.
Furthermore, health communication is central to people's ability to gain access to the public health and healthcare systems; health professional-patient interactions; people's ability to engage in appropriate self-care and chronic disease management; and people's understanding of clinical recommendations and expected outcomes. Communication is critical to the work of health professionals and their interactions with each other, their patients, and the information they create and use. Health communication principles must include the dissemination of information about individual and population health risks, the construction of public health messages and campaigns, the images of illness and health in the mass media and the larger culture, and the development of e-health applications, including online personal health records, health Web sites, interactive personal health tools, and telemedicine systems.
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