Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Public Health Needs to Get Off the Laptop and Into the Streets

Too often, we reduce our outreach to distant communication. We have to embed ourselves in communities to make a real difference.

HIV educators in South Africa in 2002.

In the early 2000s, I spent time in South Africa with the Treatment Action Campaign and other organizations, working to educate communities about HIV, the immune system, and what medicines could be used to beat back the virus and deal with opportunistic infections.

These experiences were transformational for me. I learned more from my comrades in TAC about how to use scientific information to both inform and inspire than I have gathered in any formal education I had then or since.

The work TAC did wasn’t just basic health education. It was deep, often door-to-door, engagement, with time spent in clinic waiting rooms and other venues where TAC could reach people affected by AIDS. (In South Africa, a country with 6 million people living with the disease, you could make the case that nobody was spared completely from the virus.) TAC members didn’t only teach people about why, for instance, fluconazole was critical for treating fungal infections associated with AIDS. They emphasized why it was important for people to ask why their local health facility did not stock the drug, whom to talk to about this, and their rights under the South African constitution to make these demands.

This history has been on my mind recently, because of the ongoing debates within my field about how we handled the Covid pandemic. Many in public health are convinced that the biggest problem during the height of the pandemic was a lack of good communication. The answer? That those of us in public health need to learn to be better “storytellers.”

Coming from the........

© The Nation