Reducing Health Disparities through Health Promotion and Education:
Know Your Audience.
In my first key insight, I mentioned the health disparities experienced by the Hispanic population including increased rates of diabetes and hypertension. According to the CDC, “health disparities are preventable differences in the burden of disease, injury, violence, or opportunities to achieve optimal health” that are experienced by different groups of people. These disparities can be due to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, age, gender, and other factors. In every public health class that I have taken during my time here at USC, I have learned about health disparities. They need to be addressed because not only do they hurt the groups affected by disparities but also the entire population by causing unnecessary costs and limiting advancement.
In my HPEB-300: Introduction to Health Promotion and Behavior, we discussed the importance of reducing health disparities through both health promotion and education. Health promotion and education involve providing opportunities to “acquire knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors” and implementing “mechanisms that support actions and conditions of living conducive to the health of individuals, groups, and communities” (Joint Committee, 2012). Public health emphasizes the use of program planning as part of health promotion and education in order to combat health disparities. In HPEB-300, we completed a semester-long project where we planned a program to combat a health problem using health promotion and education models. My group created a plan which would reduce rates of cervical cancer caused by HPV in African-American women by increasing the rate of HPV vaccination of middle-school and high-school aged girls. This would be done by increasing the girls’ knowledge through health education using infographics and information sessions. Our semester was spent following the Generalized Model of Program Planning – often described using the mnemonic device “Assess the Setting or D.I.E.” The steps of this model are seen below:
In my HPEB-300: Introduction to Health Promotion and Behavior, we discussed the importance of reducing health disparities through both health promotion and education. Health promotion and education involve providing opportunities to “acquire knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors” and implementing “mechanisms that support actions and conditions of living conducive to the health of individuals, groups, and communities” (Joint Committee, 2012). Public health emphasizes the use of program planning as part of health promotion and education in order to combat health disparities. In HPEB-300, we completed a semester-long project where we planned a program to combat a health problem using health promotion and education models. My group created a plan which would reduce rates of cervical cancer caused by HPV in African-American women by increasing the rate of HPV vaccination of middle-school and high-school aged girls. This would be done by increasing the girls’ knowledge through health education using infographics and information sessions. Our semester was spent following the Generalized Model of Program Planning – often described using the mnemonic device “Assess the Setting or D.I.E.” The steps of this model are seen below:
My HPEB-300 project (Artifact #1 – linked below) taught me about the importance of creating a plan designed with the target audience in mind - of first identifying a population and then assessing their needs. In my opinion, the Assessing Needs portion of the Generalized Model of Program Planning is the most important part and a large part of assessing needs is learning about the target audience and how best to adapt your intervention to their needs. One of my minors is Applied Computing with a focus in Information Science. My focus means that I have taken a lot of classes on information science - the study of information and how best to retrieve it and display it. One of the classes that I took was SLIS-201: Introduction to Information Science, really focused on defining information needs and the importance of knowing your target audience and displaying your information in a way that they can really understand. In SLIS-201, we practiced choosing a target audience and defining their information needs as well as reviewing the work of others in the information science field. For one of these review sessions I chose to look at reproductive health information and maternal literacy. I chose an article that focused on information needs of women in developing countries and how the lack of health information and maternal literacy led to worse outcomes for women, infants, and children. More specifically, the author, Margaret S. Zimmerman, focused on pregnant women and women of childbearing age. This is an example of how the more specific you can be with defining a population, the more power you have in being able to help and influence that group. I have attached my review of Zimmerman's article below (Artifact #2) and encourage you to read it in order to learn about the importance of targeting an audience and addressing their information needs.
I was able to take the skills I had learned about in HPEB-300 and SLIS-201 and use them when I got a position in a research lab. Last year, I began working in the Literacy Development Among Diverse Learners Lab within USC's Communication Sciences and Disorders department, which focuses on improving educational outcomes for children from diverse backgrounds. One of my responsibilities in the lab was creating infographics for the the groups that we work with. This includes Spanish and English-speaking parents of dual-language learners, speech language pathologists, and teachers. Creating these infographics allowed me to use the skills I learned about in HPEB-300 and SLIS-201 including choosing a target audience and creating a plan to increase their health education about a specific topic. These infographics were written with the audience in mind in a way that they would be able to understand. They are an example of health education and promotion because they educate a parent, teacher, or pathologist about how to help bilingual and dual-language learners grow their language skills. This improves their ability to thrive in school which will positively affect their later life and health outcome - therefore combating health disparities caused by lack of information on parenting dual-language learners.
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Last spring, I also completed an individual research project within my lab on The Performance of Spanish-English Speaking Children on Phonological Awareness Tests as Compared to their Monolingual English-Speaking Peers (Artifact #4). My research project showed that monolingual only speakers scored higher on every section of the phonological awareness test, which examines the ability to think about the sounds of language, than their English learning peers. While presenting my poster at Discovery Day USC, I was asked by every judge what this research meant for the future. What it means is that not only do cultural and linguistic factors influence the performance of dual-language learners, but that there also that is gaps in emergent literacy between dual-language learners and monolingual only speakers that need to be addressed through explicit instruction. I also discussed how this research will aid in the development of improved phonological awareness tests that are more accurate and this will in turn lead to stronger interventions, heightened academic achievement, and enhanced life outcomes for Spanish-English speakers in the U.S. This research is another example of being aware of the information needs of a specific audience - in this case being aware that dual-language learners are in need of more explicit instruction (information) about language and that educational professionals, such as teachers, need more information about what dual-language learners need in order to be more successful in an academic setting. This information needs to be created with the target audience in mind in order to make it more effective and combat health disparities caused by lack of academic support for children who are over- and under-diagnosed with communication science disorders.