Communicating Public Health

Hello and welcome to the first piece in a series of posts about my Communicating Public Health project!

The project

Over the coming months I will be working on a project to review how Hackney Council talks about health and wellbeing. It will look at how we can improve the way we promote our services; the type of language we use when talking to residents; and the opportunities presented by technology to better deliver our messages.

Why is this needed now? As this link shows, great public health campaigns have always been well-communicated, including my personal favourite from the past 100 years…

What’s more, we are now working in a context which is offering significant opportunities for improving the way we talk about health:

• Work done by Public Health England(PHE) and the Behavioural Insights Team highlights the effective use of techniques which encourage people to change behaviour.
• The mass use of the internet and social media present opportunities to reach more people than ever before, and to target our campaigns more effectively.
• The Health Foundation has commissioned work to improve the way that health professionals talk about the wider determinants of health. As the public still associate health with healthcare, it’s important to consider how we can raise awareness of the social drivers of health.

In short, the way we talk about health is just as important as the design and delivery of interventions. By improving the way we talk about preventative measures and by leveraging the wider expertise outlined above we believe we can achieve better outcomes for residents.

What are we doing?

The project is currently split into different issues:

1. Communicating through Commissioning

As most of our services are delivered by commissioned providers, addressing how communications can be embedded into service design will be key. Here are some of the questions we’re considering:

• Who is responsible for promoting our services? Us as the commissioners or them as service providers?
• How do we get providers to think more about communicating their service? Do we need to engage with them earlier in the commissioning process? Can we make it a part of our contract management?
• Where providers are responsible, should contracts include certain principles for promoting their service? For example should providers be obliged to deliver campaigns focused at groups we often fail to reach?

We’ve explored some of these questions with the PH Adults Team last month and will be doing the same with the Childrens Team at their next meeting.

2. Approaches to marketing

PHE have run some great campaigns in recent years and are encouraging councils to do the same by using the online and free(!!!) PHE Campaign Resource Centre. This project will look at how we can deliver effective and appropriate marketing to promote our services.

Of course, not all of our services need the structured approach of social marketing, but it should be something we’re considering if we are seeking to change behaviour or reach groups that we’ve previously failed to.

• This work initially has focused on drawing lessons from other campaigns within the team — one example being the 2017 Hackney walking campaign.
• I’m meeting with other public health teams including at City of London Corporation to discuss their Release The Pressure suicide prevention campaign.
• Also learning from how Hackney’s other service areas have delivered marketing campaigns, including the fostering and recycling teams.

3. The language we use

It’s also important that we consider the language we use when talking about health. Importantly, a lot of other people are also thinking about this right now.

You can read the President of the Association of Directors of Public Health talk here about the lazy use of language in public health which suggests that good health is entirely the responsibility of individuals. We wholeheartedly agree with the broader understanding outlined in this piece — describing many of the factors that affect long-term health as ‘lifestyles’ makes them sound like choices, when we know there’s a huge range of influences on the decisions people take.

So how do we shift the conversation on the social determinants of health? The Health Foundation have commissioned some really interesting work on this question. You can read their recent briefing paper here, or read their blog here and you can follow their project here.

Elsewhere, registrar Andy Turner has spoken on his blog about the mistake of using jargon when talking to residents.

Thinking about the language we use will be an ongoing focus of this project and I’ll seek to make best use of the insights taken from these wider projects.

Contact

So, that’s a whistle-stop tour of the project so far. Feel free to respond with any questions or comments on this page or e-mail me on — christopher.caden@hackney.gov.uk

It would be great to have your thoughts!