Why is this toolkit important for health professionals?

The Communicating Health Toolkit has been created to empower health professionals by providing you with evidence-based, best-practice recommendations for effective communication, utilising the principles of social marketing.

Many health professionals may be familiar with O'Toole's (Communication: Core Interpersonal Skills for Healthcare Professionals, 2020) communication model focusing on the ultimate goal of person-centred care. The Communicating Health Toolkit extends those skills beyond the therapeutic relationship and person-centred care to an audience-centred approach with a larger population outcome as the goal.

Toolkit Contents

The toolkit has been split into the following key sections:

• WHY provides some background information on why it is important for health professionals to step up as the experts to enhance the way health messages are communicated.

• The PLANNING section of this toolkit provides you with some practical tips for effective communication planning. For those who want to go deeper, this section also provides an overview of health-behaviour change theories and the principles and benefits of using a social marketing approach.

• The AUDIENCE section helps you choose your audience and provides tools to help you understand your audience to help you produce audience-centred communication. It explores the tools of segmentation and provides examples from Communicating Health research into the segmentation of young people.

• The SOCIAL MEDIA section is where you will find practical advice on using social media for health communication. Here you will find information on building trust, what works and, importantly, doesn't work on social media, how to find time to communicate via social media, and insights from our research on communicating with Indigenous Australians via social media.

• A GLOSSARY section has also been included to provide you with a rundown of some of the regular terms you will come across in the toolkit.

• A TEMPLATE page that provides some downloadable templates to help you plan and implement your communication.

Each page has additional resources and links to the full Communicating Health research publications.

For more information on the NHMRC funded Communicating Health project see our About page.