Everyone has equity goals we’re trying to reach, often as part of our regular jobs. Here’s one way to advance on our health equity goals: by looking at communication with equity lenses.
Everyone has equity goals we’re trying to reach, often as part of our regular jobs. In this episode I offer some help, maybe encouragement on how we can advance on our health equity goals, by taking equity lenses on communication
Hi everybody, this is “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel. Our Equitable Communication course has been found to make a statistically significant improvement in people’s communication knowledge, confidence, and skills. What this course has, that no other does, is a one hour, live, group meeting for the course participants after the course. So we can get started applying what you’ve learned in your specific workplace. Learn more at healthcommunicationpartners.com.
While you’re there sign up for our newsletter! So I’m on the mic alone today. We’re in the midst of a 4 part miniseries on public health communication with Samantha Cinnick from HRSA. Parts 1, Part 2, Part 3 are out; I’m going to link to them in the show notes in case you missed them. And part 4 is coming after this episode, and then I have a special announcement.
So everyone has equity goals they’re trying to reach. Advancing health equity is many organizations’ #1 priority right now. Last month, two publications about health equity came out. You may have heard about them; they’re generating a lot of attention. In one study, researchers found “Over a recent 22-year period, the Black population in the US experienced more than 1.63 million excess deaths and more than 80 million excess years of life lost when compared with the White population.”
A second report called “The Economic Burden of Racial, Ethnic, and Educational Health Inequities in the US” found “In 2018, the estimated economic burden of racial and ethnic health inequities was $421 billion (using MEPS) or $451 billion (using BRFSS data).” That is in one year, wow. So we’ve got loss of life, loss of years, and economic impact of health equity.
Where does communication come in here? Both studies cite the landmark 1985 Heckler-Malone Report that documented and drew attention to health inequalities in the US.
This report does talk about the importance of communication. We also have, fast forward to 2002, Unequal Treatment I’ve talked about before as giving us evidence for focusing on communication as a mechanism for reducing inequalities. I’ve observed in the last 3 years this trend has accelerated, that there’s more awareness, more public discourse, more political will. More people and orgs realizing: yes, it’s good by many metrics if we think about equity when we think about communication.
I’ve been thinking about equity and communication for more than 20 years, starting back at the University of Pennsylvania. There are many relationships between equity and communication. So in this episode I’m going to do a quick flyover then look specifically at putting equity lenses on. How to do it and look at communication, including 2 specific actions you can take.
As I said, there are many relationships between equity and communication As a consultant this is most of what I do, capacity building for clients to help them get benefits, help them reach their goals. And I see this work fall into a few categories.
One I call “communicating about equity.” In this I put anything that’s awareness about health inequalities. That would be many public health campaigns, awareness about resources that are available that are designed to address inequalities. This also includes research like that studies I just mentioned. It could also include communication about what a particular org is doing about health inequalities. So this is “communication about equity.”
A second category I call “communicating for equity.” This I consider communication directly with specific groups of people who are being least well served by current arrangements. Here we’ve got any tailoring communication, any tailored health information. The fields of health promotion and Health literacy really lead the charge here.
And then the third category is where I’m putting communication w equity lenses. That “equity lenses” terminology has gotten popular. The CDC is using that phrase too. They have a helpful set of resources I’ll link to in the show notes. I think putting on equity lenses implies taking a second look at the ways we do communication. Beyond “what can we communicate about” or “what are we communicating for,” to questions about how are we going about this communicating? How are we thinking about communication and the people involved? So there’s a lot of reflexivity and you know I’m a reflective practitioner.
There’s an episode we did earlier this year that’s our most popular of the year so far, about opening a meeting with a reflection on communication. In that I share a passage from Gee in which he invites us to take a second look or second listen to communication.
I think that second look idea is helpful with the lenses metaphor. We’re looking, we’re putting on lenses and we’re looking at communication.
So let’s break this down a little more. What are we looking at? I’m going to suggest there are two things you can look at when you put on equity lenses and you look at communication. One would be to look at an existing communication product, thing. – this could be a conversation, written materials, a digital communication, web page, a screen on an app, in research terms we call all of these a text. The collective term texts counts for whether it’s spoken, written or digital. So you could take an equity lens to a text.
Another thing you could look at with your equity lenses is looking at the process it took you to make that text. So this could be your thoughts, it could be a common routine or workflow. Go-to resources you lean on when you make your materials. Hoops you jump through. Whatever the process was you went through matters to communication. Like any process it can be improved. That’s also what I do as a consultant so I’m speaking from experience here.
So two things you can look at with equity lenses: more or less the process, or the product.
There’s the thoughts on the communication part. Now the equity part.
When you put on equity lenses, you’re looking at communication with equity in mind. I’ve said in an earlier episode What is meant by the term “health equity” is far from obvious. It’s important that we think hard about it. Please check out for yourself some of the literature on the meaning of health equity. Literally, Google Scholar and put in “Health Equity definition” or “Health Equity meaning.” It’s substantial. So do yourself a favor and dip your toe into a couple pieces here or there, and see how different people are taking it up.
Like I’ve said before, including last month, I’m not going to tell you the definition of Health Equity you should use. This is for 2 reasons. One, I’m one of many people who suggest that if we tried to impose one true definition, it would be antithetical to the work of health equity.
And also because once you have a definition, whatever you personally use, or whatever is being used by your organization right now, that definition should be able to evolve. Because your understandings of equity are also going to evolve over time and our definitions should reflect that.
So whatever definition of equity you use, equity lenses as a metaphor exists because putting them on allows us to see something we could not see otherwise, or we could not see well from our usual ways of looking, or from our usual perspective. So we need these equity lenses to focus our vision and get the benefits of what we are then able to see. This has been “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering by Joe Liebel. Music by Joe Liebel and Alexis Rounds.