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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Donald Rubin, PHD, MA, Center for Health and Risk Communication, University of Georgia, 110 Terrell Hall, Athens, GA 30602-1725 and Lenette Golding, MPH, Center for Health Communication, University of Georgia, 110 Terrell Hall, Athens, GA 30602-1725, 706.542.4893, lenetteg@uga.edu.

The Southern Center for Communication, Health, and Poverty (SCCHP)—a CDC-funded center of excellence in health communication—is committed to public health workforce development in communication to reduce health disparities. A number of factors converge to create particular needs in that domain. For example, communicating about genetics-related risks presents particular challenges for public health work force training. In addition, responding to commercial advertising that promotes unhealthy life style choices is critical for health protection among minority adolescents. The “digital divide” may limit access to information for many poor and near poor, and especially for the elderly. Finally, many health and risk communicators possess credentials mainly in emergency response and preparedness and not in communication. This presentation reports the results of needs assessments conducted by means of focus groups and online surveys with three of SCCHP's constituencies: state and local public information officers, local risk communicators employed mainly by bioterrorism programs, and MPH students. Preliminary results indicate that public information officers seek especially to acquire strategies and skills for reaching new populations of immigrants. They already feel knowledgeable about cultural sensitivity issues. Local risk communicators share that perceived need for skills in communicating with linguistically diverse populations. They also seek assistance extrapolating from emergency preparedness messages to health protection messages. This group does not believe that individual job coaching would be an effective training strategy. As for MPH students, some are naïve about the communication demands in their prospective jobs, however most do sense a need for tools to facilitate community-based collaboration.

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss 6 factors that contribute to a current need for conducting workforce development needs assessment in the domain of communication to reduce health disparities.
• Identify the role of the Southern Center for Communication Health and Poverty (SCCHP) in monitoring and addressing workforce development needs in communication to reduce health disparities.
• Assess SCCHP methods and findings regarding workforce development needs in this domain.
• Prioritize workforce development activities on the basis of research findings reported.
• Articulate future directions for needs assessment in workforce development in communication to reduce health disparities.

Keywords: Health Disparities, Training

Related Web page: www.biomed.uga.edu/health_communications.html

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered

Handout (.pdf format, 50.9 kb)

Handout (.ppt format, 1107.5 kb)