A lot well being communication today is targeted on a single all-vital matter: COVID-19. In an emergency, run-of-the-mill well being points are inclined to take a backseat — and no marvel! Once you’re consumed with fear a couple of life-threatening infectious illness, it’s arduous to concentrate on, say, lowering your sodium consumption.
However these much less flashy preventive well being steps are each bit as life-saving in the long term — and because the pandemic continues, well being communicators want to start out speaking about them once more. We’re nonetheless determining greatest practices, however for now, strive the following tips:
- Give attention to instant well being advantages. Reducing lengthy-time period danger isn’t all the time the strongest motivator for habits change — particularly when individuals are confronted with a brief-time period menace like a pandemic. Say you’re selling bodily exercise. As a substitute of speaking about the way it lowers most cancers danger, concentrate on the way it may help folks really feel higher straight away. If folks know that being lively can shortly enhance temper, ease stress, and enhance sleep, they simply may give it a strive.
- Provide COVID-acutely aware diversifications. Recommendation to eat wholesome and get lively can appear insensitive or out of contact when individuals are locked down in small areas, or once they’re having bother accessing wholesome meals. So provide suggestions that make sense for the present circumstances — like methods to get lively with out leaving the home or details about contact-free pickup at native meals banks.
- Make (cautious) connections to coronavirus. All of the false “cures” for COVID-19 floating across the web reveal a helpful reality: a number of folks will strive something to enhance their possibilities of survival. And whereas we are able to’t provide a treatment, we are able to take this distinctive alternative to advertise behaviors that enhance the chances — like quitting smoking. The clear and current hazard of coronavirus would be the motivation folks must lastly make a change. So if there’s good proof for a COVID-associated well being profit, strive making that connection.
- Assist folks prioritize preventive care. Many preventive well being suggestions contain physician visits, and folks want steering to get this care safely whereas social distancing. Inform folks which forms of preventive care, like childhood vaccines, must occur on schedule. And urge folks to speak with their docs earlier than suspending much less pressing appointments, like annual physicals. There could also be a protected approach to get much less pressing care on schedule, too — like shifting to telehealth visits.
- Lead with empathy and suppleness. Disgrace and blame are by no means good public well being methods, and that’s very true in a world pandemic. First, acknowledge that even easy steps can really feel actually arduous proper now. Then encourage folks to make small, manageable adjustments. Eat a vegetable. Go for a 5-minute stroll. Get an additional half hour of sleep. These are all wins! Assist your audiences have fun the small successes as we speak — and construct on them tomorrow.
The underside line: Speaking about something aside from coronavirus is hard proper now — however we are able to discover methods to maintain common outdated preventive well being behaviors within the dialog.