The President of the Ghana Heart Foundation, Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng has appealed to health practitioners to introduce pragmatic strategies to enhance health communication in the society since “health illiteracy” was a cause of poor health conditions.
He said effective health communication will help provide multifaceted approaches and comprehensive interventions as well as messages which would best reach the intended audiences to ultimately protect public health outcomes.
Prof. Frimpong- Boateng was addressing participants at the opening of the first University of Cape Coast (UCC) Faculty of Arts Colloquium in Cape Coast on the theme “Communication, Culture and Health”.
The three-day colloquium which has been instituted as a biennial meeting is aimed at providing a platform for researchers in the humanities at UCC and other avenues to disseminate research findings on selected themes in order to inform policy briefs of the University and the nation.
Participants, drawn from various health, culture and communication disciplines including staff and students of the Faculty of Arts, will be taken through three plenary presentations, forty-eight scientific research reports, a seminar as well as a round table discussion.
Prof. Frimpong- Boateng said messages given to the public on their health needs should be accurate, evidence based and devoid of distortions, errors, and misinterpretation.
He said to ensure effective healthcare delivery, there should not be any language barrier and that health facilities should have effective health communicators who would ensure appropriate understanding between health practitioners and patients.
He suggested that features and diagrams be used in explaining health issues to enable patients and clients understand the various health messages and urged health practitioners to adopt electronic data keeping of patients’ records since it was one of the important needs many hospitals lacked.
Prof. Frimpong- Boateng associated the causes of rampant environmental pollution to the lack of health researchers and communicators who would research and design appropriate strategies to educate the public.
He also mentioned the internet as one of the social platforms where information could be disseminated to its targeted audience and that when appropriately used could be of immense assistance but could expose patrons to various health risks if misused.
He said health literates would be able to manage their diseases and illness better than those who did not understand what was going on in their immune system warning that lack of skills to enhance effective communication could result in complications or even death of patients in some cases.
Prof. Frimpong-Boateng noted that the use of communication strategy, methods, programmes and interventions as a means to inform and influence individual decisions would enhance health and increase audience knowledge and awareness on health issues.
On culture and health communication, he said a number of cultural beliefs such as sex with a virgin being the cure to HIV /AIDS or cancer was a worrying situation and expressed regret that people still do a lot handshaking at funerals without washing their hands afterwards.
He condemned the cultural conception that delivering at home showed how strong headed a woman was and called for prenatal and anti natal care in order to reduce maternal death.
He said indiscriminate use of mosquito coil because of the misconception that they were harmful only to mosquitoes and the excessive use of plastics especially black polythene bags in food packaging were habits that needed to be changed to foster health care.
The Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Prof. Dora Edu-Buandoh, said in 2013, UCC decided to address health as the focus of its research for the next five years and in order for the Faculty to create a niche for itself, a research into “Health Challenges in the context of the humanities” was conducted.
She said it was based on this that the theme for the colloquium was identified adding that health was the binding force that brought the research in the humanities with those in the sciences.
She said although modern scientific medical practice and new technological approaches had revealed new ways of addressing health problems, explorations from the perspective of the fine arts and humanities could contribute significantly to the understanding of the socio-Cultural underpinnings of health problems in Ghana.
Prof. Edu-Buandoh said from the patients’ point of view, cultural background and religious affiliation were important factors that come to play in accessing health facilities.
Source: GNA