Communications Breakdown: What Works (and Doesn't) in Health and Science Communication
Communications Breakdown is a new podcast that breaks down what works (and doesn't) in health and science communication. Hosted by Tracy Mehan and Katrina Boylan, this podcast brings you into their world of research translation, health promotion, public health communications strategy, website and social media management, graphic design, and much more.
Communications Breakdown: What Works (and Doesn't) in Health and Science Communication
Lessons from the Next Generation Part 1: The Missing Pieces in Health Comm Education
What do emerging professionals in health communication wish they'd learned in school? In a long, revealing conversation, we dive into candid interviews with three recent interns who came to us from diverse educational backgrounds.
Our discussion centers on a critical reality: students pursuing careers in public health communication receive minimal hands-on experience during their formal education. While they may learn theoretical frameworks and analyze existing campaigns, it’s challenging to replicate the work environment in an academic setting, so skills like accessibility and translating data for different audiences are often new concepts to the students who pass through our program.
This episode, the first in a three-part series, offers valuable insights for educators, health communication professionals, and students alike about bridging the gap between classroom learning and real-world practice.
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This podcast is a project of the Center for Injury Research Translation and Communication (CIRTC). Connect with CIRTC: www.cirtc.org
Find CIRTC on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and YouTube.
Note: all thoughts and opinions shared in this podcast are personal and not representative of any organization.
Welcome to another episode of Communications Breakdown, where we break down what works and doesn't in health and science communication. I'm Tracy Mehan.
Katrina:and I'm Katrina Boylan. Today we're going to bring you the first in a three-part series that gives us a glimpse into what young professionals looking to work in public health, communications, medicine and other fields are seeing and hearing as they get ready to enter the workforce. I recently recorded interviews with some of our interns, and Tracy and I each listened to the interviews and then got together to break them down. What you'll hear in this episode and the next two is that conversation broken down into three parts.
Tracy:So the first episode starts with the state of health, communication, education and some gaps that exist, and then we kind of focus on accessibility, what it is, how important it is and how they learn how to actually do it. In the second episode you'll hear about language, using data for communications, and then a little bit in the end on Canva and graphic design, and then finally in the third episode we'll end on Canva and graphic design and then finally in the third episode we'll get deeper into creativity and graphic design, as well as the importance of structuring and planning for dissemination of your messages.
Katrina:So let's introduce and say thanks to the three young women who worked with us. We're going to hear from Elena, who majored in communications and only recently found health communication and had no experience with data and research. We're going to hear from Yara, who majored in communication technology, who had a lot of experience in research and public health. And then we're also going to hear from Juliette, who majored in public health and has a strong interest in maternal and child health.
Tracy:We're going to start by hearing from them why they looked for a health communication internship in the first place. I love this question because I'm always curious to hear about what got them interested in health comm and what they are hoping to get by working with us. Let's listen in.
Katrina:So we're going to start here with Yara.
Yara:The whole idea was that for me, learning about health communication through textbooks and lectures was just not enough. I knew I was interested in it, but I really wanted to get hands-on experience with it. I had, prior to this, done some research On health communication jobs, but there weren't many, very many opportunities, and especially not ones that combined Like health communication with research, like this internship had mostly like it was mostly like corporate communication stuff like that.
Katrina:And next we have Elena.
Elena:And I'm hoping that I am able to do work similar to what I've done in this internship in the future. I think that it's super important and there's a large gap in the way that information is conveyed to the public, because not everyone has the ability to interpret a high level knowledge that is often construed in like medical studies and academic studies.
Katrina:And finally we have Juliette.
Juliette:My I think it was my sophomore year of college or actually my junior year of college I took a public health class called role of behavioral health or something like that, and it was about health promotions and with my degree plan that was one of the only like health behavior, health promotion classes I actually experienced.
Juliette:So like before that I hadn't really I think I had known generally just like knowing about like the world itself that like things like health communication, health promotion existed, but I hadn't taken an actual course in it and I ended up becoming really interested in the topic and that kind of being one of my main public health focuses. And then I think last year I was researching different health communication, health promotion internships and I was really interested because within public health, I always had a really big interest in maternal and child health and so I thought this would be a great opportunity because it's more, you know, there's some research aspects of it, like working with the like translational research team, doing all that stuff, but then there's also more like social media, more image focused things, which I also liked because I had experience with that from a extracurricular club and so I knew that coming in, I would be able to learn new things about health communication but then also actually use some of the limited experience. I had to like further grow with health communication.
Tracy:OK, so I heard a couple of things there. First is something that you and I have talked about ever since you've been here and it's something I've heard pretty consistently since I've been working with interns is that students might be getting some exposure to the idea of health communications in their classes but if they are, it's not a lot and they aren't really getting hands-on real-world experience in the way that they're looking for.
Tracy:past told us that they really . want These that more practical experience with health comm, that they're actively looking for it and they're having trouble finding opportunities. And I think it's really important for public health programs to hear that and think about how can they more actively partner with organizations that can help provide these experiences to their students. The other thing that I heard that kind of stood out to me was how aware they were that most people don't really know how to read or make sense of medical and academic studies. They are seeing this large gap between these dense studies that come out and what the public can grasp. And I'm guessing COVID has a lot to do with how people are seeing that. Now, right, we saw people not being able to understand the research and the impacts of what that was, and so they said to us we're interested in learning how to build this skill.
Katrina:Yeah, yeah, and I can see how that would be hard to do in a classroom. So I think one of the things that I hear, too, is that we need to figure out how to translate some of this into the classroom, because not everybody is going to have the opportunity to come through an internship like ours, and so how can we teach these skills more in the classroom? You know, integrating that theory rather than just, you know, kind of giving it to them and then moving on. So okay, so I think that then leads to the next question, and so you know, speaking of what they're doing in class, I also asked them how this internship compares to what they were doing in class, and so let's hear what they had to say.
Elena:No, I've experienced nothing like this. A lot of what I do in my classes is very academic textbook based, and so I think that there's no substitute for an internship. I feel like I have just learned so much, and I would have never gotten that otherwise
Yara:On the content creation side of things not really in my education, we would just really go over like existing health campaigns, like critique them, assess them and just I don't know, like study research articles as well but it wasn't really creating it.
Juliette:Even with classes you know you receive kind of feedback at the end and that's just the grade and obviously you can take that feedback and, I guess, help further assignments.
Juliette:But for the most part it's like, once the grade is there, you can't really do anything with the feedback. So I thought with this internship it was good that I received multiple rounds of feedback and I was actually able to like build on those things. I do think as my internship time like continued I was able to actually make those changes before. Like if someone corrected me on something like, oh well, don't do this or this is better, then I feel as though my the more things I worked on, I didn't do those things as much anymore. So I do sort of I learned like things that were maybe better for health communication or even things that maybe are not allowed but are maybe not the best practices in health communication, which I didn't really know about before, because besides that one class I discussed, we don't really have like a health communication course or anything like that.
Tracy:So again, a few things stuck out to me from those. The ending comment there about how they don't really have a health communications course I think that's really true and we'll see that in some of the questions that are coming up here. But the thing that really struck me when I was listening to these clips was this concept of the feedback loop that Juliette mentioned. She kind of commented on how in school the feedback you get is one-time feedback at the end of the project with a grade, and that really stuck with me because you know she commented on in this internship the iterative feedback that she got along the way was what really helped her grow and learn and practice those skills right. And she talked about how each time she got feedback she could incorporate it into another task and she could see her incremental growth and I thought that was, that really struck me right
Katrina:Yeah, yeah, no same for me too. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Tracy:And I think there's power in that type of feedback that continues to build. And I will say, having gone through a PhD program myself in more recent years and being a TA for classes, it is hard to give that type of feedback in a classroom, especially when you've got 80 students in your classroom. You just can't give that level. No, that's a great point, right, and so I think that's. I think that's important, and the other thing that it really made me think about is how different the stakes are when you're working on a project that is actually going to be used as part of a real campaign by a real organization.
Tracy:Our organization's reputation is on the line with everything that we put out into the world, so I'm not going to let something go out the door that isn't of the highest quality. So when we give feedback to our interns, they see it as real and tangible, and I honestly think it's a surprise for a lot of them when we tell them no, we can't use this and here's why. And then we teach them what it looks like to do it differently and how to make their work something that we can use, and that's not feedback that you can get in school or even when you're trying to simulate an experience, the professor in most cases isn't telling you no, that absolutely can't be used, and then teach you how to change it. That's just not feedback that you get in many cases. So there's that different kind of impact that they get from that experience of really watching a no turn into a yes and seeing it get used.
Katrina:Yeah, and I think that's the other thing that we really do try with this internship is to give them that real world taste of this is what we go through all the time, and I do think it's pretty eye-opening the levels that we look at any given product. It is something that I've heard frequently, but I do think your comment about there is no, it goes back to what elena said about there's no substitute for an internship, because you can't, you simply cannot, not only provide that feedback to you know, the, the students in your class on that level, but also you're simply not, as you've said, adding in the stakes of it all. The real world aspect of it is like this is going out to, you know, in some cases, thousands of people, and you know, I heard I think it was Yara say that you know they would review campaigns but not necessarily create them either, and so even just the process I think of. How did we even get to it? You know, as you said, we said no, but how can we get to yes?
Tracy:Yeah, and we've had people reach out to us to work with their classes. That's not an internship, but it's like they want to do a campaign for a real life thing. They're going to plan for a real life organization and you work with them. But even in those, I think they're incredibly helpful. But you have to make sure that the organization you're working with can say no along the way and give feedback. You know, in some of those cases they met with us at the beginning and asked our ideas and maybe sent us a question or two by email and then presented at the end, as opposed to working along the way. It's more work for the organization. So I'm sure it's hard to get people signed up in that way, right, but you know, it just might be another type of way to get the work in there.
Katrina:Yeah, no. And I think, though, that is one benefit we can offer is, you know, doing that individual one-on-one that not everybody can do, as you said, and it's important to think about the broad range of experiences that we can be offering to people, not just what we do.
Tracy:Yeah, and there's nothing that can replace that real hands-on experience and letting them watch what it looks like to put the theories they are learning about in their books into practice
Katrina:Absolutely, and actually that is a great lead in to our next question. We're going to hear these interns now talk about what experiences they had using research as the basis for developing messaging or just applying the theories that they're hearing.
Yara:So in my studies I was taught how to conduct communication, research, like how to measure and understand the findings and just how to read the articles in general, but I had never applied it to any real organizations. In my classes we'd have to come up with a like, a theory or hypothesis and then just do our own thing and come up with a bunch of numbers and like OK, I guess it was just all like practice, not really for anything.
Katrina:OK, so it was maybe the first time you had had a topic, had to research it, right, right, okay, so you had not had experience doing that before, right, is that correct?
Yara:Yeah, in terms of health communication. No, it was just like random things we'd come up with
Elena:It was a little daunting. I think that the team really helped me through it. They kind of knew that I wasn't, this wasn't my area of expertise, and this was my first time looking at it. So they kind of helps me through the process, but I definitely feel a lot more confident looking at it now.
Tracy:The first thing that came to mind for me after hearing these was that we do a pretty good job of training our students how to read and understand research for themselves or in some cases, depending on their degree, even conduct the research, but we don't do as good of a job of teaching them how to read research with the goal of helping other people understand it, and this is something I have learned and seen working with students throughout the years that just they're not getting the practice with that. And the other thing that really stuck out to me was I think it's important to note here that we purposely take people in our internship program that are not just in public health programs, because we know that out in the world, a lot of people that end up communicating about public health programs, because we know that out in the world, a lot of people that end up communicating about public health topics weren't trained in public health.
Katrina:I was not. Right, yeah, yeah, I was not at all.
Tracy:So it's interesting to me because the last one we heard was our communications intern and she told us she had very little experience reading public health research and even less with the goal of identifying key messages and interpreting that for the public. And it's fascinating to me because many scientists that we work with rely on their communications team at their institutions to do the translation of their work and yet many comms people haven't been trained on how to do that.
Katrina:Yeah, and I think the you know, yes, about Elena, with the lack of research experience. There is a skill I have learned in how to train someone to read a publication for messaging or for, you know, a communications purpose, rather than looking at it through, you know is the science sound, or that you know that maybe epi or a different type of public health approach, and so that is one thing that I think we can also help other people do, and you know we're trying to do not only through this internship but through CIRTC. For instance, is that messaging for public health based on the data. You know you're going to look at the data differently than through again like that Epi lens or something else, and so, even if you have a lot of experience, as you said in, you know more of the epi side or you're looking at more that the data crunching, the way that you look at those numbers is going to be so much different.
Katrina:And what I heard from Yara is that I think she said that you know she had looked at again those numbers and things before and read articles about kind of how to do it, but she had never looked at, you know, a paper, looked at it from a health comm perspective and then pulled that messaging and again it's that different look at the same research. She had seen the research through kind of the epi side but not through that health comm side. So I just want to tease that out a little bit, also for our listeners, that there's a difference between reading research for health comm purposes and health comm research. And so you know there is research on things like you know, health literacy and numeracy and things like that relating to health comm, and so it's a little bit of a nuance. We use health comm research in our health comm practice but we're translating in most cases epidemiology research.
Tracy:Yeah, there's a difference that I don't think everybody quite gets of looking at research to be able to accurately portray what the research found to other researchers, versus looking at that research and telling somebody who doesn't have a research background or a background in that kind of research what's the so what for me and how does this work matter to me, and how do I talk to you in a way about this research that might help you change a behavior, for instance?
Katrina:Yeah, A whole different skill set. Yeah, it's a great way to put that. Yeah, Totally Okay. Well, let's then move on to the next question, and I really like to ask. I'd like to ask each intern what is something that they didn't know, that they know now. Because that type of open-ended question, I get some really fascinating answers. I've asked this question on most of our exit interviews and so, again, we've only just recently started recording them. But I will say that this is one of the most fascinating questions because I just I don't I personally don't know what I don't know about these students and what they found valuable. But by learning about what they're finding valuable, we can then help tailor that for future students.
Katrina:So let's hear what they had to say.
Juliette:I knew it generally was a thing but I think when working on a lot of the visual components, like the accessibility. So I obviously, like I knew, like what accessibility was and even with you know, making items accessible, I think in my head I was just like, well, like alternative text that makes sense and like those kind of things, but I didn't really think about the importance of color contrast or font size or even like the repeatability of images themselves, like if it's like you're putting a very small image, you know we can tell what it is. They think that, like I knew what accessibility was, but I think it kind of showed me the other ways that it's important. Like I think a lot of people, when they think of accessibility, they think of like these really big things. Obviously those are incredibly helpful as well. I think you also have to think about what's these small things that a lot of people are not realizing and it's making certain things inaccessible to them, especially when you're talking about, you know, childhood injury prevention and things like that. In the US, you know, literacy is also not always super high, so it's like even that is being accessible by writing in ways or using certain images over like just um, like paragraphs of text. So I think that was something that was really helpful, and I think I've also like started using it in my more everyday life.
Juliette:Like, um, the club I'm a part of, where I'm doing the social media. Like before, when I would make certain event posts, I would kind of just make it based on aesthetics and be like, okay, well, that's fine. But then now I've started certain event posts, I would kind of just make it based on aesthetics and be like, okay, well, that's fine. But then now I've started realizing, okay, well, maybe I should actually check if this is accessible to people or if it's not. And so I think that's definitely something that is important on. You know, big things also, even small things, cause it's like, yeah, like, why doesn't everyone deserve accessibility? Even if it's like a club poster or an Instagram post, like, why not make that accessible?
Yara:An accessibility idea of accessibility. I had not thought about that before. I think the biggest thing I learned with content creation and just everything that I was doing in this internship I was thinking about like my language use and accessibility, like with every step of it, it allowed me to see like an entire new side of content creation and just a new audience I had never thought about, like alt text and all of those things beforehand.
Tracy:Yeah, I really loved it when Juliet said why doesn't everyone deserve accessibility, even if it's a club post or an Instagram post?
Katrina:Mm-hmm.
Tracy:It really struck me how new the concept was for her. If that was a revelation, right, right, and so you know. It made me think about how much we focus on thinking about all the different types of people that might be interacting with our campaigns and our messaging, and it's a real focus of our team to make sure that our content is accessible to everyone, even people with visual or hearing challenges.
Tracy:You know whatever different level of accessibility you might have to this material, and here we have two interns who are telling us that this isn't something that they had been taught to think about before or how to do it in practice. Yeah, and it was my experience as well. I've been out of the program for a few years now, but it wasn't something that I even remember honestly ever coming up. I had to seek out a class I think it was in the sociology department on health literacy. It wasn't even something that I could find in the public health department.
Tracy:Yeah, so I think as a field we can do a better job of thinking about the little things we can do to make the content we're already creating accessible to everyone.
Katrina:Yeah, I think the other point I think I can draw from this is that sometimes what we can offer students isn't necessarily the most obvious things. I think a lot of people that I have seen out in the field are practicing accessibility. You know, pretty, pretty regularly we notice that some things have caught on more than others. But I'm seeing alt text, you know, pretty much in a lot of spaces now, you know, and so I'm struck by the idea that sometimes what we can offer students isn't necessarily even kind of the biggest stuff. In a way, it's just the opportunity, I think, to come in and see all the pieces that we consider when we're putting out campaigns or even, just again, content on social media.
Katrina:But again, we do know that not everybody's doing this all the time and we're not perfect either, but it is to me surprising that it hasn't kind of trickled down to academia a little bit more, and so that just tells me that, again, maybe the people who are in the instructors, you know, haven't been able to see this stuff, you know, kind of firsthand themselves, and so how then do you bring it back to your classroom. So I guess that to me is also a call to maybe again work more closely with schools of public health or something about this workforce, this thing that we're doing in our workforce right now more regularly. But you know, again we're hearing from the students. They're like, yeah, we knew a little bit, but not enough. You know not what they should know. This is a real gap in a skill, in my opinion.
Tracy:Yeah, you just made me think of something else, too. I think you're right. I think if you are in, you know public health departments or places like that we are seeing that work happen more often. I think we can all always improve more, right, but I think I see that more. I think the interesting part for me, though, is kind of thinking about this academia angle that you brought up. We aren't seeing it as much there, and this is an area that I have taken on personally. accessibility checks everything from adding alt text, even in PowerPoints and reading order and you know visibility and how it looks and I do not see other researchers doing that, and I think there's this kind of perception of well, I'm talking to other people in academia, and it's almost like the people who have different abilities in academia are invisible, and I can't tell you how many times I have presented in an academic setting and had somebody come to me afterwards and say thank you for making that accessible. Nobody does that, and in those situations I didn't know that person needed it and was in the audience. I did it because I always do it, because I want it accessible to everyone in case, because I don't know Right. So I think it is important for all of us, even if we're in the academic spaces, to realize how important making our work accessible is every time we talk about it.
Katrina:As we said in the introduction, it made sense to divide up this conversation, so this is where we're going to end the first segment. The second and third parts are available now, so please check those out and, as always you know, please like, share, subscribe comment. As always you know, please like, share, subscribe comment. You can even text us using the link in the description box or the show notes, but you know, we do really appreciate your thoughts and feedback. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Blue Sky and YouTube as CIRTC. That's C-I-R-T-C and, once again, we really do appreciate you listening Until next time.
