US vs THEM

Another thing we learned about in class was the importance of the way messages are delivered. Are they sender driven or receiver driven? Are we, public health professionals, the focus of the communication or are the customers (patients) at the center? A perfect example of a customer focused health campaign is the Kaiser Thrive Campaign. The commercials always catch my attention on TV and are focused around giving the members power over their own health. I hadn’t seen the commercial below before but I think it is brilliant!

How many health messages do YOU receive?

Everyone of us is exposed to health communications. Whether we pay attention or not is a whole different story. This past week I spent 24 hours counting the communication messages I was exposed to. I had to separate them into health messages and non-health messages. I had a hard time counting the non health messages simply because there were so many of them. However, spending 24 hours of being extremely cognizant of all the health messages in my life was eye opening. In one commercial break during Extreme Home Makeover (yes, I love that show) there were 4 health commercials and 4 non health commercial. That is ONE commercial break!!!!! We learned about the Communication Persuasion Matrix which includes and one of the categories is exposure. I can tell you one thing, all of us are definitely being exposed to health messages. The challenge comes in fulfilling the other steps of the matrix; getting our attention, interest, understanding, yielding, and behavior change. I challenge you to just pay attention for 20 minutes to see how many health messages you are exposed to. Then think about how many you regularly pay attention to and how many affect your health behaviors? I guess it depends on how important the issue is to you. You pay attention to things that you care about and you ignore things that you think don’t pertain to you. Then how do you get a person to pay attention to something that they should care about but don’t? Ah, the challenge of creating a successful health message….

Testing out my very own blog

This is my first post on my first blog, how exciting. We are doing this as a part of a Health Communication class to explore the vast world of online communication. I can't wait to see how this develops throughout the semester!!!!