How health literacy can combat misinformation and improve health for all  

 Gretchen: Hello and welcome, this is Prevention Works. I’m Gretchen Miller, coming to you from The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre and we’re on location at the Sydney Health Literacy Lab at The University of Sydney today where we’re talking health literacy, what it means, how we can improve it, and how co-designed research – working with partners – can help health communicators to effectively and genuinely reach young people.

I’m here with two guests, the Lab’s Deputy Director, Associate Professor Carissa Bonner, a behavioural scientist who uses psychological theory and methods to address communication issues in public health. And she is amongst other things, a Senior Research Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics in the Faculty of Medicine and Health, and Carissa is also Chief Editor of the journal Health Literacy & Communication Open.

Carissa is supervising final-year PhD candidate Melody Taba, who also joins us, and Melody’s research is into youth health and social media, such a valuable arena. She is aiming to improve the health messages young people receive from health authorities on social media platforms, which is where they all hang out, and we’ll be getting into the specifics about this in the second part of the program. Welcome to you both. Thanks for joining us.

Carissa: Thanks for having us, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Carissa, let’s start with you. Can you introduce our listeners to the Sydney Health Literacy Lab at The University of Sydney, what is it?

Carissa: So, the Sydney Health Literacy Lab, which we also call SHeLL, is a group of mostly psychology-trained behavioural scientists working in public health. We work across a really wide range of health topics, and we have around 40 people in our group. A lot of our work is focused on identifying and addressing communication problems that are a barrier to good health or to clinical guidelines. So, we work across things such as how we can help GPs explain heart disease risk assessments to their patients all the way through to cancer screening and more recently work on things like COVID-19. [00:02:16]

Gretchen: Can you explain what’s meant by health literacy and where we are on the international scale? Is there a problem with it in Australia?

Carissa: Well, the short answer is yes. There is a problem here, but there is a problem in most countries with health literacy. So, what we mean by health literacy is having the ability to find, understand, appraise, and use health information in ways that can benefit both individuals but also communities. There’s been a bit of a shift in our understanding of health literacy that we really need to be working at system and organisational levels, not just focusing on individuals and putting the responsibility on them.

Gretchen: And up to what, 60 percent of Australians have low health literacy?

Carissa: So, there is a varying estimate, but probably the most comprehensive measure was 59 percent of people in Australia do have problems with health literacy and it’s not necessarily they can’t understand health information, it’s that the environment isn’t meeting their needs.

Gretchen: Melody, it’s a really complicated area and often health literacy offers quite basic information, can yet somehow manage to be over-complicated. On the other hand, sometimes it’s patronizingly basic. Could you speak to that?

Melody: So, I guess at the start of the COVID pandemic, we really saw this happening where there was a lot of mis-translations or bad translations of COVID information that was coming from Australian health authorities that just wasn’t resonating to the community members who need it the most, including culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

I know in my research with young people as well, often-times they reported that the content that was being shared by health authorities wasn’t really getting through to them or it contained really complex language or just language they don’t really relate to.

Gretchen: So what does that lead to then? And when you say translation, I’m imagining what you mean is those sort of information sheets that are in multiple languages. Is that what you’re referring to? And then what’s some of the outcomes as a result of that?

Melody: So, if the translation itself is poor, then that can affect decrease the person’s knowledge or understanding of the information and therefore have knock-on effects with the health outcomes. So, that’s why a lot of times in the health literacy space, we talk about how health literacy is really key in improving those health outcomes.

Gretchen: I mean, I’m imagining there’s a kind of a critical window actually for getting health information out there and obviously in COVID-19, we saw that information changing quite a lot, but you needed the population to be on top of it. If you don’t get that clear guidance out there, quite quickly, what does that leave people open to?

Melody: Well, that definitely leaves a big gap for misinformation or not so reliable information to take place. We see that a lot in the social media space where I work in, so a lot of official health organisations are absent on social media platforms or do not create a lot of content on them which leaves a big black hole of information that can be filled by nefarious actors or simply just misguided people and individuals who share health information online without necessarily the right qualifications or evidence base behind it.

Gretchen: I mean, I recently asked my new community I’ve moved into where I could get another COVID vaccination and the people that leapt on that question, immediately were full of, why are you doing that? We’ve been misled and so on… So, we’ll get to some of that conversation a bit later on.

Carissa, I wonder if we could come back to you. You have a behavioral science background, in particular psychological theory and methods. What does that mean and what does it bring to your work in health communication?

Carissa: Yeah, so in the research space it means using a combination of qualitative research methods so that we can really understand what the barriers might be to a particular health guideline or health behaviour that we’re trying to implement. But also using experimental methods to test different ways that we can overcome those barriers. So, we do a lot of hypothetical scenarios where we test different ways to explain complex health issues.

Gretchen: Oooh, can you give us an example?

Carissa: Sure. So in COVID-19, we were really fortunate to have some funding from the Sydney Infectious Diseases Centre to look at different ways that we could address issues around COVID testing. So, we found in our early surveys, that people who have lower health literacy had really big knowledge gaps, but we weren’t entirely sure how best to explain that to those communities. So, we actually did some really interesting research working with a TikTok influencer where we had a social media style communication compared to a more government style fact-based animation or a tailored interactive website.

So, they’re all really different ways to get to these communities and we used an experimental design to test which ones were most effective. So it turned out the video formats worked the best for people with lower health literacy and there was not actually much difference between the humorous TikTok style and the fact-based government style. So, either one was working for that particular population. [00:07:21]

Gretchen: That’s really interesting actually, because I’m thinking of how government, I suppose, whether it’s deliberate or not, has a particular way of communicating in the public space. And it’s an, it’s an evolving beast, but I remember it from the ‘Slip Slop Slap’ campaign. But I wonder also if actually that kind of messaging also makes people go, okay, I’m going to sit up and pay attention because this style of communication usually comes from you know, a formal trusted source.

Carissa: Yeah, that’s right. So sometimes the more boring style can actually work quite well if it’s really clear and to the point and uses some basic design principles. So using that simple language again to make sure everyone can really access the key message, but also using simple animations can make it a little more engaging. And for government authorities, which is the topic of Melody’s PhD, they might not be able to do that engagement with social media influencers because it can be risky for various reasons. So, it’s good to know that those, I guess, more boring style videos can still work really well to improve understanding.

Gretchen: Could you both chip-in Melody and Carissa to explain the biggest threats to health communication, I think in particular it’s online, right? It’s the online space?

Carissa: Yeah. So we definitely saw in COVID-19 that the health information environment on the internet is so full of both mis-information, disinformation, even reliable information that is out-of-date can be just as damaging as it’s the more deliberate attempts to misinform people, so when there’s this huge overload of information and people don’t know where to go for reliable information, as Melody alluded to, the gap’s going to be filled by all these other less qualified people who may or may not have reasons to dissuade the public from following health advice.

Gretchen: And the World Health Organization has labelled this an infodemic, right?

Melody: Yeah, that’s how much of an issue it can be and we saw that, of course, health misinformation did exist before the COVID pandemic, but just the rise of it during the pandemic was unprecedented, I guess. So, it’s definitely becoming a more researched area as well and we’re seeing a lot of research on how we can best tackle misinformation. A lot of colleagues in the area are coming up with different strategies, including things like pre-bunking misinformation so making sure that you’re actually fact-checking and proving the misinformation for what it is, misinformation, before it becomes popular and starts spreading everywhere like wildfire. [00:10:02]

Gretchen: I’m wondering if you could both speak to what happens if we don’t get better at this and fast. I mean, that pandemic hit really quickly, didn’t it. It wasn’t no time at all before we were all in our houses…?

Melody: That’s right. So, if we don’t have established communication channels that people know to go to when they need it, when we have an emergency situation like we did with COVID, that hole gets filled by all sorts of misinformation or outdated information. So I think it’s a really good time for us to be thinking about this with the setup of the Australian Centre for Disease Control, which can hopefully in future be a sort of central hub, a source of truth, I suppose, or up-to-date health information where people will actually know where to go straight away but that’s going to take a bit of time to set up and make sure that they maintain trust with the community as well.

Gretchen: Okay, so a good time to test it is in between pandemics, I guess, and in between emergencies of all kinds, including climate?

Melody: Yeah, that’s right. And we’re seeing a lot of reflection at the moment about what worked and what didn’t work so well and even the more basic things that they’re not as exciting as the latest AI or chatbot that people like to sort of hang their hats on for the next solution. But we need to do really basic things better like providing those translations in real time that are actually reliable and checked and culturally appropriate.

Gretchen: I mean, Melody, you’ve pointed out that young people actually have higher health literacy needs than many adults because they have less experience with the health system and trusting their medicos, I imagine. Can you speak to that and when it comes to social media, what organisations should be looking to do?

Melody: Definitely. So when it comes to online health information, there’s a few different literacies that are required. So of course you need health literacy and a lot of young people have lower levels of health literacy simply by virtue of the fact that they have less experience with the health system, health information, but they actually do have really good levels of digital literacies because when we talk about young people who are perhaps in their teens or early twenties, they grew up on the internet and they always grew up with a device that was connected to the internet.

So they’re actually quite savvy with how to navigate online information. It’s just that gap of navigating online health information that is really key to make sure that, you know, young people can, know what’s a reliable source of health information and what’s not such a reliable source.

Gretchen: So, I think what’s clearly critical is that organisations get into the online space and fast. What’s holding them back? Why aren’t they active in that space enough yet?

Melody: Well, I think it just depends on a variety of different factors. So the research that we’re doing, which is part of my PhD, we’re talking to a lot of different stakeholders at different levels of government who are in charge of health communicating to the public, especially on social media, and we’ve heard that they’ve had a lot of difficulties executing some of the messages they want to…there’s a lot that’s been of red tape and difficulties with getting across some of those more social media style posts over the line. In general, I think social media can sometimes be considered an afterthought for health organisations because it has never been a key medium for health communication up until very recently. [00:13:26]

Gretchen: So when you say red tape, you’re saying internal red tape in the organisations themselves, a reluctance and perhaps an anxiety around it?

Melody: Yeah, potentially. I think it just speaks to how new this medium is and how often-times in an organisation, sometimes using those new and unpredictable mediums like social media can face a little bit of reticence from higher-ups.

Gretchen: Okay. Let’s get into some detail about your work, Carissa. You’re both engaged in co-design as a critical tool in health literacy as a way of sharing decision-making. What is a decision aid and how does it adapt to different levels of literacy?

Melody: So a lot of the Health Literacy Lab is involved with the International Shared Decision Making Society. So shared decision-making is a way of doing medicine that is less paternalistic and takes the patient’s individual values and preferences into account to come up with a shared decision. So you’re still taking the evidence into account, but you’re putting that together with what will really work for the patient in front of you.

So patient decision aids are an evidence-based communication tool that helps facilitate that shared decision-making process. And there’s been hundreds of trials showing that they do work to help patients better understand their choices, and engage in a more informed shared decision-making process.

Gretchen: Can you give us a concrete example of what that is?

Melody: Yeah, so most recently we’ve been working in the space of heart disease prevention. So to engage in shared decision-making there, ideally a GP should be using a heart disease risk calculator and an updated calculator has just been released last year.

So we have to start with the risk assessment and we’ve been working with the Heart Foundation to develop evidence-based risk communication tools to help GPs explain these abstract risks to their patients. So, the decision aids explain clearly what the risk means, what the options are in terms of medication to reduce that risk, and also what the side effects as well as the benefits are, because we know there’s often a bit of a bias in medical consultations to only talk about the benefits of an intervention and forget about the harms or the costs that might be associated with that too.

Gretchen: So a decision aid is an abstract thing or it’s a list of questions or a list of facts, what is it?

Carissa: It can actually be all of those things. So a decision aid is generally either a printed brochure that you can sort of go through step-by-step or it’s an interactive website, but it can also be in the form of a video. It’s more of a process to guide people through understanding what their options are and what the risks and benefits might be for them.

Gretchen: And so when you talk about that in terms of co-design or collaboration. What does that mean when it comes to the authority, the doctor sitting there opposite me, the patient?

Melody: Yeah, so how, I’ll stick with the heart disease example. So where we started with that is doing qualitative interviews with GPs about how they assess risk and they were very across the guidelines. They had a few things that they maybe needed some extra training on, but for the most part, they were okay with the guidelines.

Then you talk to their patients and they have no idea what their risk of heart disease actually is. They are often on medication that they don’t know what it’s for or they might be not taking medication when they’re actually at very high risk. So there was this real mismatch between what GPs sort of thought they were doing and what the patients were taking away from those consultations.

So in that context, we really saw that we needed to work with both the health professionals and the patients to develop some tools that could be integrated into the consultation. So that’s why we used a web-based format for that decision aid and we linked it to the risk calculator that’s in the guidelines so the GP could in just a single click populate the risk assessment, so that’s the guideline bit and the evidence, and then also populate the decision aid that would show the patient for you at your particular risk. This is how much the statin will reduce your risk if you choose to take it.

Gretchen: And that was work you did with The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, I think, so what lessons did you learn from that work and where is it at now? [00:17:30]

Carissa: So where we’re going next with that is I’ve been working with the Heart Foundation to pilot some national screening programs. So trying to get over those health literacy issues around people even being aware of the issue or that they should get a heart health check at a particular age. And we’re working with software providers that are integrated with general practice systems. So essentially what we’re doing is sending out SMS from general practice to say you’ve reached the age or you have some risk factors where a heart health check is recommended you should come in to see your GP and that’s been really successful with increasing the rate of heart health check billing by about 14 times in our first trial.

Gretchen: That’s a lot, right?

Carissa: Yes, it’s had a huge impact.

Gretchen: How did you two come to work together? Carissa, I know you had to do a rapid pivot during COVID, right?

Carissa: Yeah, so I was always focused on heart disease prevention and when COVID hit, I was just about to start a really big trial across Queensland. So we just recruited our first general practice and then had to put a pause on that trial for a couple of years. So a lot of the researchers in the Sydney Health Literacy Lab were in the same situation, we couldn’t really progress without our normal research, so we decided to come together to see what we could do to contribute to the COVID space.

So we already had those psychology research methods in place. We knew how to get really quick ethics approval and run these national representative surveys to see what sort of psychological things were going on that might prevent people from engaging in COVID prevention. And then Melody came across our group through our promotion of that research on social media. So particularly we were using Twitter a lot to try to engage with health policy makers and media and Melody approached us with a brilliant idea for a new program of work.

Gretchen: Melody, you know, COVID took us all by surprise. What were you planning to do before you came across the tweet on Twitter?

Melody: Yeah, so I was already in the youth health research space working as a research assistant and during the start of the pandemic and the lockdowns, I had a lot of time to think and I was on social media a lot, and I started to see the different ways that health authorities were using social media to communicate to young people. I was a young person at the start of the pandemic, not so much now that I’ve gone through my PhD, [laughter] exactly, exactly. But yeah, I was very much inspired to see how we can improve the way that health communication is being done on social media. It was just very serendipitous that, I saw the Sydney Health Literacy Lab and Carissa’s work and I pitched the idea to them and the rest is history and we’ve been able to work on this project as the pandemic evolved and also kind of keeping it broader and on a larger level since our findings can be extrapolated outside of a health emergency setting as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean what were you actually planning to do before that all came along? You were interested in health communication,  were you going to do your PhD at that time?

Melody: I always knew I wanted to do a PhD so that was always in the cards for me, but I always wanted to come up with my own project. So I was really lucky that I did find supervisors who were able to support that dream. Yeah, and it’s been a pleasure ever since.

Gretchen: So what have you found in doing that research as part of your PhD and being a part of the literacy lab?

Melody: Yeah, lots of things. So the way we’ve set up the project is we started off by just surveying the environment in that we did a content analysis of the social media posts that the health authorities were sharing that were aiming to target young people. We had a look at the lay of the land there and we saw that health authorities were using social media very frequently to target young people with health messages during the COVID pandemic in the early stages especially, however, they were using a lot of platforms that young people weren’t necessarily on. So there would be lots of messages for 18-year-olds to go and get COVID boosters but these would be shared on Facebook, which is not a platform that 18-year-olds used.

So, yeah, we found some interesting things there and we also saw that some health authorities also did do a little bit of experimentation with social media strategies. Some did use humour, emojis and memes in their communication of these messages but it was quite rare and in the follow-up studies that we’ve been doing throughout this project where we have been talking to young people, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from them that they would like to see health authorities employ these kinds of strategies on social media in a way to get through to young people, get their attention. It’s really hard to catch someone’s attention on social media so you do need to kind of adhere to the rules and different techniques to grab attention.

Gretchen: Now, what I really want to ask you about is when we talk about co-design in lots of different spaces, and I’ve done a lot of it myself in the journalism space, I’m thinking about how is it possible for health communicators, you know they’ve got some experience, they’ve got some knowledge, and they’re older. They don’t necessarily understand what younger people are doing. How critical is it to actually get and include young people in this communication? So I’m thinking, “nothing about us, without us”, that catchphrase. [00:22:51]

Melody: Yeah, it’s super critical, and that’s something that we’ve been hearing from the young people that we’ve been talking to throughout this study. They are really keen to be involved in these processes. They’re really keen to partner with health authorities, but we have also been speaking to the professional stakeholders who do work at health authorities, and we’ve been hearing a lot about I guess the barriers and difficulties with doing true co-design with young people for, let’s say, putting out social media health messages, but there’s definitely different ways that these two groups can work together in a way that, you know, it’s still being true to young people’s interests and what’s appealing to them, but also is able to operate within the requirements from a health authority. So we’ve been talking about things like focus groups or different ways that young people can be involved in an internship level and just different ways that young people can have a say in the content that’s supposed to be for them, that’s being shared by these health authorities.

Gretchen: And what kind of response have you had to those kinds of proposals?

Melody: So far, it’s been quite positive. We’ve been speaking to mostly the people who create the social media content at different health authorities across Australia and in general, they’re very on board with this idea. It’s more the logistical side of things that is a barrier, if anything. And a lot of the times in general, the social media content creators in these health authorities, they are younger in age, so they do have their finger on the pulse on what other young people would like but of course, you know, they’re not necessarily teenagers. [00:24:27]

Gretchen: How do you get around inherent assumptions from health communicators about what young people want and need to hear?

Melody: I guess the answer to that would be co-design and actually include young people’s voices and ask them what they want. We’ve been talking to a lot of young people throughout this process and a lot of them are really interested in health in general and they do want to be involved. So it’s just about the matter of finding someone and creating some sort of partnership with them in whatever way suits the organisation.

Gretchen: Just going back to COVID, it was really interesting how you analysed the communications that were out there. And you analysed, you know, what percentage used still images and what used videos and now is it GIFs or JIF.

Melody: The million-dollar question! [laughter]

Gretchen: I know, isn’t it? I suddenly felt both are acceptable. Okay, because I always say GIF and then I just thought, oh maybe I’m just old. [laughter] I wonder if you could sort of speak to some of the figures that you observed and how effective some of those things are?

Melody: So in that content analysis study that we did, we found that almost all posts that were shared by the health authorities at that time period that we were studying them included visuals, which is really great. As Carissa mentioned, there’s a few things that we can do to improve the health literacy of health information and so obviously having a visual component to the message really helps. We found that there were also a lot of still images and to a lesser extent, moving images like videos and the GIFs, and we did see that the health authorities used a lot of those good practice communication techniques like calls-to-action and responsive communication. That was really important addressing the current need, if there was a new update or change in requirements for the COVID practices that were required.

And we also saw that a lot of the health authorities did actually lean on more of those positive emotional appeal messages rather than fear-based messaging, which can be a useful way to frame your health message in a time where, you know, a lot of people are under a lot of stress especially young people during the pandemic.

Gretchen: That is really interesting on a number of levels, so there obviously was quite a lot of appropriate messaging but your point was it was in the wrong place, the main place where the problems lay?

Melody: It’s definitely one of the main factors there are also different ways that health authorities can increase the guest friendliness of their content to young people the way that they communicate the kinds of people that they feature in their posts. So for example, we know that young people really need and like somebody who is relatable to them to be sharing this information. So while they do want reliable health information from health professionals, that doesn’t always mean that the health professional needs to be front and centre giving this message, perhaps it can be somebody who is younger in age or relatable to them sharing these reliable messages on behalf of the health authorities. [00:27:34]

Gretchen: And when you’re talking about positive messaging resonating loudly in my head right now is when I was a teenager, that was when AIDS hit, and the messaging was far from positive. Were you around for any of that, Carissa,  you might’ve been a bit young?

Melody: I was a little bit young, but it’s really well-known in the health communication literature that that was too far. So it’s sort of a famous bit of research because it showed that actually too much food can be a bad thing and can actually backfire. And that’s a really tricky line to walk is you need the content to be engaging and safe, scary content is one way to make things engaging, but you also need it to be effective. So just scaring people is not effective. It has to be linked to an action that they can actually take that is feasible and accessible for them. [00:28:22]

Gretchen: I mean, I’d like to come back a little bit to misinformation because we know that social media can be an amazing force for good and I’m very present on it and it’s enriched my life for sure. But it’s definitely the wilds, and we see a lot of misinformation out there, deliberate misinformation. Maybe you could speak to that study which identified over 50 percent of TikTok videos about COVID-19 vaccination were discouraging it?

Melody: Yeah. So that was a really interesting study coming from a US research group which found that a lot of the content that was being shared about COVID vaccination on TikTok specifically had that negative slant to it. They do also mention in that work that some of it may have been poking fun or joking about people who may be anti-vax. So, it’s not necessarily discouraging vaccination content in its most obvious sense, but perhaps something a little bit more double-layered and I know Carissa can also speak to that as well in her other research with the Twitch study.

Carissa: Yeah, so it is a really challenging space to research because you can’t necessarily take the text of a post on face value, you need to understand it in the context of what is the meme going around that week and what is the norm of the community that you’re researching. So again, through Twitter, not only did it bring us Melody, who is now our social media star, but we had some really interesting discussions in relation to some of our early survey research where we were able to show that young men and younger people in general were more likely to endorse certain misinformation beliefs.

That was early in the pandemic where there was a conspiracy theory going around that the COVID was caused by 5G and so that was one of our findings that if you’re younger or if you were male, you were more likely to endorse this 5G statement and I got into a discussion with a Twitch account manager, so Twitch is a gaming platform used by a lot of young men, and he said, I don’t actually believe that finding because it’s a joke in our community. It’s funny to talk about 5G causing COVID. It doesn’t mean they believe that 5G caused COVID. It’s part of this trend and it’s like it’s a human thing. And so we actually ended up working with that Twitch account manager to just see what sort of conversations people were having on these Twitch platforms when you introduced the idea of COVID vaccination in a normal gaming stream. What type of conversations do they have? And you could see that there was this kind of stream of kind of humorous posts that if you analysed it really bluntly, you could, you know, assume that that meant people were anti-vaxxer but they actually weren’t when you looked at their vaccination engagement. So, it was more like a way to engage within that community.

Gretchen: Okay, so that indicates to me the answer to my next question, which is, how savvy young people are at sifting through that information because I see a lot of that misinformation about COVID vaccination, not necessarily going as far as the 5G idea, but people genuinely believing that it’s a plan, it’s a plot, it’s a control mechanism and that’s coming from much older people. So I’m wondering if young people are better at sifting through that misinformation?

Carrissa: I haven’t seen any evidence to show you that there’s like a clear age effect on that. I don’t know if you’ve come across that?

Melody: Not so much in the literature base, but I know in a lot of the interviews that we’ve been doing with the young people, they do mention that a lot of the times they’re actually the ones that need to educate their parents or grandparents on a lot of the COVID misinformation that was going around at the time. So that’s, I guess, intergenerational health literacy and practice where it’s the young person who maybe has a better understanding of online mechanisms and digital literacies going back and educating their family members to not share health misinformation or explaining that this is obviously a hoax or an online joke.

Carissa: And that could also be seen in sort of more basic access to healthcare so when there were first vaccinations available in Australia, it was only available through a pretty hard-to-use website and only in English, so people in multicultural communities who weren’t necessarily so confident in their English language skills or their digital literacy were relying on the young people in their families to help them navigate these websites just to be able to book a vaccination. So when we talk about health literacy, it’s not just about understanding, it’s about being able to access care so that sort of thing can be a real barrier but as Melody mentioned, having that intergenerational community, or just a broader community, in general, is another way to build up health literacy. It doesn’t have to be every individual who understands everything.

Gretchen: Good point. One last question for you, Carissa. We’ve talked a lot about young people in this conversation, I wonder whether health communicators can afford to be behind the eight-ball on this when it comes to young people’s health. What are the risks there and why are young people particularly important? [00:33:13]

Carissa: Well, as Melody mentioned before, young people are less engaged with the health system on average. So they are going to be more reliant on these other ways of finding health information, they are not necessarily seeing their GP for an annual check, so I think that’s a real key difference in the prevention space in general, but for young people specifically,

Gretchen: Any final words from you, Melody, on what the critical message is to get across to policy makers about engaging young people?

Melody: I guess the main takeaway is young people really care about health. They’re really interested in learning about health and so it’s important that health authorities communicate health messages to young people in a way that they understand and is relevant to them.

Gretchen: And build that trust, I imagine.

Both, it’s been so great to chat with you. It’s such important work. Thank you very much to Associate Professor Carissa Bonner, Deputy Director of the Sydney Health Literacy Lab at The University of Sydney, and Melody Taba, soon to be PhD, whose ongoing work in this area is well worth keeping an eye on.

This is Prevention Works from The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, I’m Gretchen Miller and just to say, we would so appreciate it if you’d leave us a review on Apple Podcasts to help bring us to new and perhaps even younger audiences. Thanks again. See you next time.