long view and ensuring that strategies prioritize building trust and credibility over time.

Many speakers and participants spoke to the need to elevate the essential role that health communication plays in protecting public health—a mission of many federal agencies. “Communications in health science is generally undervalued and underestimated across the federal government,” noted one federal participant. Part of valuing the role of health communication involves providing the needed support within government and through external supports to front-line federal communicators, as well as support and/or training for scientists and volunteers in communities who work to communicate with and engage communities, noted the participant.

LISTENING TO, COLLABORATING WITH, AND INVESTING IN COMMUNITIES

One key theme in the workshop, said Amelie Ramirez, Professor and Chair of Population Health Sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Director of Salud America!, and Planning Committee Member, is the importance of building trust and engaging with communities. This requires approaching communities with humility and building long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships. Communities need to be treated as equal partners, and those working with communities need to acknowledge communities’ unique culture, expertise, and values, she said. Communication with communities needs to be bidirectional; Ramirez said that community health workers are natural, trusted leaders, and other partners, such as Federally Qualified Health Centers, can be leveraged to connect with underserved communities and facilitate mutually beneficial relationships. Partnering with community organizations or individuals can enable the federal government to better understand the community, to create bidirectional channels for communication and information exchange, and to build relationships based on a foundation of trust. Further, community partners can be more agile and responsive to local needs than the sometimes-slow-moving federal government, and they can connect community members with needed services and address multiple needs. Investment is needed to make these relationships happen, said Ramirez, including funding for new infrastructures and opportunities for sustainable relationships.

LEVERAGING SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HEALTH COMMUNICATION EXPERTISE

Another issue that arose repeatedly during the workshop, said William Hallman, Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University and Chair of the Planning Committee, is the need to be clear

and explicit about the unique knowledge, skills, and competencies of communication experts, to leverage existing social science to inform evidence-based approaches to health communication, and to promote inclusion of communication experts in all facets of science and health. Health communication is “more than just messaging”—it is a science, and it is essential in multiple roles, including community engagement, stakeholder partnerships, communicating and amplifying information, building trust and credibility, and evaluating efforts, Hallman said. There is a need to encourage leaders to include communication at all levels. Arthur Lupia, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, said that conveying the importance of communication is difficult to do through abstractions, and easier to do through sharing iconic cases that could foster conversations about the role of communication and how this expertise can be leveraged.

Jeff Niederdeppe, Professor of Communication at Cornell University and Planning Committee Member, underscored, along with other participants, the expertise and experience in health communication already present in federal agencies. Hallman suggested the need for mapping existing capacity and finding ways to better institutionalize existing knowledge and share information both within and across agencies. In addition, the large body of evidence in behavioral and social sciences needs to be leveraged to improve health communication at the federal level, said Hallman, and investment is needed in evaluation to learn from successes and failures. Itzhak Yanovitzky, Professor of Communication and Public Health at Rutgers University, emphasized, along with other participants, that communication experts need to be involved when decisions are made, to inform effective communication strategies.

COORDINATION AND PARTNERSHIPS TO EXPAND CAPACITY

Collaboration, coordination, and partnerships can expand the capacity of the federal government to effectively communicate about health, noted a number of participants across sessions. For example, there are multiple types of data needed for health communication, said Hallman: data on the needs and characteristics of communities, data for decision making, and data for evaluating efforts. While there is a need to map the many datasets that may exist within federal agencies, they are often not connected, and may not lend themselves to the real-time analysis necessary for proactive, agile decision making, said Hallman. Partnering with external organizations may be one approach for increasing the availability of data and improving the ability to use them. Another approach, said Maimuna Majumder, Assistant Professor in the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and Planning Committee

Member, is building a public, shared infrastructure for large-scale data collection and dissemination, including user-friendly analytic tools to allow people to get real-time, policy-relevant insights. Better data would allow for more nimble communication and responsiveness to the community’s needs, while creating new partnerships and strengthening existing partnerships could bring together data, people, and resources.

Workshop sessions highlighted the importance of partnerships to expand capacity through partnering with local health departments, as suggested by Hilary Karasz, Deputy Director of Communications at Public Health — Seattle & King County and Planning Committee Member, or fostering community-academic partnerships, as suggested by several speakers including Ella Greene-Moton, Administrator of the Community Based Organization Partners Community Ethics Review Board and Flint/Genesee Partnership, Health in Our Hands, and Planning Committee Member. Others noted the value in coordinating or partnering with professional organizations or considering public-private partnerships.

MECHANISMS TO SUPPORT COLLABORATION AND LEARNING

Given the wide variety of expertise, roles, and perspectives held by people working in communication, it would be hugely beneficial to create a mechanism to bring people together to share ideas and to discuss successes and failures, said Hallman. Among the mechanisms participants listed were professional conferences, networks, regular seminar series, and communities of practice. Another participant suggested creating community-based technical support teams. These teams could serve as a mechanism to bring communication experts together, making them available for researchers and government programs that need help with community engagement and other facets of communication. In addition, while formal mechanisms are useful, one participant urged people to consider regular, informal gatherings to learn from one another. Lupia seconded this idea, noting that a group of communication experts could hold monthly Zoom meetings during which they could discuss issues that government officials are struggling with. A participant said that any mechanism—whether formal or informal—needs to include a diverse range of people, including higher-level officials and those doing the frontline work. Convening diverse groups of people could help inform policy and dissolve some of the boundaries and silos in government work.