CDRP Hosts 10th Annual Symposium: The Art and Science of Public Health Communication

L-R Dr. Allison Arwady, Dr. Jasmin Tiro, Dr. Harold Pollack, and Dr. Marcia Tan at the CDRP 10th Annual Symposium: The Art and Science of Public Health Communication

On October 25, the Center for Chronic Disease Research and Policy hosted its 10th Annual Symposium, The Art and Science of Public Health Communication, at the Study in Hyde Park. With a keynote lecture by Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady, MD, MPH, the symposium also featured talks by Marcia M. Tan, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Behavioral Science in the University of Chicago Department of Public Health Sciences, Jasmin Tiro, MD, MPH, Professor of Public Health Science and Associate Director of Cancer Prevention and Population Science for the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center, and Harold Pollack, MPP, PhD, Helen Ross Professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, as well as an introductory address by Everett Vokes, MD, John E. Ultmann Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. With over a hundred attendees—including forty who attended virtually—the symposium brought together students, researchers, public health officials, and members of the public to discuss how different communication strategies can influence and empower individuals, populations, and communities to make healthier choices.

Dr. Allison Arwady

“This topic is the topic for me. When I think about communication and lessons learned, I could talk for hours,” said Arwady during her talk, “Communicating through a Crisis: Chicago Public Health’s Approach and Lessons Learned,” which reflected upon the experience of leading the city of Chicago throughout the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. “For most diseases we know what to do with people who are sick,” she said. “Communication and coordination are where outbreaks go wrong… We don’t historically fund public health communication well. We need to develop our ability to communicate better across the spectrum.”

Because the “pandemic of the century” required “nimble” messaging that responded directly to public concerns and shifts in local data, Arwady noted that CDPH embraced social media as part of its communications strategy—including conducting Facebook Live sessions seven days a week for several months. “We’d spend half to two-thirds of the time directly taking questions from the public—that’s not normal for a government agency,” she said. Arwady emphasized the importance of having a “single overriding communications objective: what is your single message? You say it over and over and over again. It is more effective to say the same thing seven, eight, nine weeks in a row, and tie it specifically to local data.” Arwady commended cooperation within the Chicago government as a contributing factor in effective communication and efforts to address misinformation. “Our goal is to build and maintain trust in the CDPH,” she said.

Dr. Marcia Tan

Patients are more likely to adhere to treatment, engage in treatment, and follow doctor’s orders when they have trust,” said Tan in her talk, “Bridging the communication gap between providers and the community: a case for empowering community health workers.” Citing her studies of breast cancer and tobacco cessation in Black communities, Tan discussed the important role community health workers can play. “Community health workers are really the frontline public health workers,” she said. “Medical mistrust… is a natural result of recurrent systemic discrimination and racism over time, particularly seen among minorities such as Black Americans. Community health workers are trusted members of the communities they serve and often come time come from the communities they serve”—and thus should be engaged in health education, behavioral intervention, and patient advocacy.

In “The multilevel ecosystem influencing health communication and decision-making,” Tiro compared the rise of the Internet, “one of the greatest scientific discoveries and investments we’ve made in the past century,” to the development of the printing press in terms of its potential to increase public literacy. “But is more information better, or is it a problem? What is happening to the public when they have this plethora of information available to them? Instead of being able to make informed decisions, we’re seeing a lot of decision paralysis.”

Referring to her research in HPV vaccine hesitancy, Tiro remarked upon the confusion the employment of politicized rhetoric can produce, citing as an example the appropriation of “choice,” broadly associated with female bodily autonomy in abortion debates, by Texans for Vaccine Choice, an anti-vaccination, anti-science political action committee. She also described the clout influencers demonstrated in promoting vaccine adoption, as well as the increase in vaccinations created by more subtle interventions, such as sending texts to patients with messages such as, “A flu vaccine has been reserved for you,” as demonstrated by a University of Pennsylvania’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative led by Katy Milkman. Looking to the future, Tiro said, “We need to network. We need to partner with our community leaders and policy makers… We can’t wait for people to show up in our clinics. We must use our expertise to reach out… and educate our public because the next public health crisis and emergency is imminent.”

Dr. Harold Pollack

In “Public health messaging and political polarization,” Pollack directly addressed the problem political polarization poses to public health communication. “Conservative voters and conservative political elites have identified the public health community with Democrats and with political liberalism and have chosen to become political adversaries of many public health efforts,” he said, noting that the problem is not new to COVID-19: “Those of us that are old enough to remember the HIV/crack epidemic days… have seen this play before.” The effects on public health have been devastating. Pollack presented data demonstrating the correlation between political allegiance and COVID vaccination and death rates. “Counties with large Trump voter shares had markedly higher COVID deaths,” he said. “Post-vaccine, the excess death rate among Republicans rose to 153 percent of the democratic excess death rate.”

Like Tiro, Pollack suggested that a change in messaging could result in better health outcomes generally. “There were examples where people say… ‘You’re the breadwinner for your family; your personal responsibility is not to bring COVID home and not to get yourself avoidably sick where you can’t be the provider for your family, and you’ve got to go get your vaccine because that’s how you protect your family and that’s your individual responsibility.’” He also urged the cultivation of communication among parties of diverse political views in educational settings. “We have to think about how we train people and why we have a pretty low level of cultural competence in talking across the political divide,” he said. Quoting John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher best known for utilitarianism, Pollack concluded, “Those who know only their own side of the argument know little of that.”

After the lectures and panel discussion, the Symposium continued with lunch and a poster session. The winner of the poster session was Jason T. H. Cheung of the University of Chicago Department of Public Health Sciences, with a poster entitled, “Biased cancer-related tweets by congress members in the United States: implications for combating cancer disparities in the social media age.” First runner-up was Andrew Shahidepour of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, with a poster entitled, “Mathematical Modeling of Diabetic Kidney Disease and Sodium-Glucose Cotransporter-2 Inhibitor Treatment for Diabetes Mellitus Simulation.” Second runner-up was Veronica Gonzalez, Media and Digital Content Intern at Illinois Medical Professionals Action Collaborative Team, with a poster entitled, “Using Social Media to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Vaccine Access during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The IMPACT Experience.”

Poster winner Jason Cheung

“The vision of the Center for Chronic Disease Research and Policy is to create a world where healthcare research and policy seamlessly interact to improve the health of individuals at risk for or living with chronic diseases,” said founding director Elbert Huang, MD, MPH, in his introduction to the Symposium. “One goal of the meeting is to interact with someone you don’t know. The purpose of these symposi[a] is to bring together academics, clinicians, and policy makers all in place so we can have an exchange of ideas about big gnarly problems that we face.”

L-R Dr. Elbert Huang, Dr. Marcia Tan, Dr. Harold Pollack, Dr. Allison Arwady, and Dr. Jasmin Tiro at the CDRP 10th Annual Symposium: The Art and Science of Public Health Communication.

Watch the presentations from the 10th Annual Symposium: The Art and Science of Public Health Communication on the CDRP YouTube Channel!

Story and photos by Irene Hsiao