The health communication program, introduced at the University of Sydney in Semester 1, 2009, was the brainchild of two academics, Simon Chapman from the School of Public Health and Fiona Giles of MECO. It came about to fill a void in the public health teaching program, namely mediated discourse, journalistic activity and promotions in public health. Over the years, the program has moved away from this focused orientation to include broader perspectives on the health communication process. It continues to combine the expertise of MECO, where all the core courses are located, with the resources of the School of Public Health, where students can choose from a plethora of elective courses. Subsequently, this cross-disciplinary and collaborative approach to both media and health disciplines has made the program the most comprehensive and specialised course of its kind in Australia.

I have directed the program since I arrived at the University in 2011. I hold a senior lectureship in strategic and health communication, after having held similar positions at the University of Florida and the University of New Mexico. Prior to my academic appointments, I worked in the communication industry on the media and agency side in two countries for about 10 years. Health communication is a crucial function for public health. I am trying to teach people to understand what communication does and can do, and how it can be improved. Coincidentally, in the new normal of living in a pandemic, health has become a very relevant concern, where students more readily see the relationship between health and the act of proper communication.

Health communication as a discipline exists on the threshold of multiple sectors because it combines scientific knowledge and findings from the life sciences, such as health, with the communication sciences, which is larger than media studies. If you go to the doctor, you do not use media; you sit there, and she sits there, and you talk. It matters to both of you whether that’s a good conversation or not. If we aggregate this dyadic relationship to the health status of an entire nation, it becomes obvious that the public will benefit from living in a well-functioning health system where the members of that system can communicate effectively and learn from each other.

I am an affiliated researcher at the Charles Perkins Centre (part of an interdisciplinary research collaboration surrounding obesity prevention), a research network member on infectious disease prevention with Sydney Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity Network and an advisory board member of the International Health Humanities Network. My research is primarily in health communication, specifically in the field of community engagement, social/health practice and health humanities approaches. My plan is to get people involved in finding solutions for health behaviour maintenance as well as analysing social routine practices as determining factors for engaging in healthy behaviours, or not.

From my perspective, research needs to assist with the main objectives of professional health communication, namely creating understandable and motivational messages for the population. The one thing that we are working on is trying to figure out how we can get people to be part of an intervention as designers, co-creators or co-researchers and not just as study subjects. Moving from a position of data sources to creating their own solutions to a health challenge in their community increases the chance that targeted individuals want to make a change for good, because they have become their own solution and realise the agency and power they have over their own health.

In obesity prevention, for example, there are numerous groups and industries involved, from the accredited government agencies like hospitals and health departments to affiliated groups like dietitians and nutritionists, to self-declared experts on social and traditional media who offer up advice on diets, exercise and staying thin. In short, there are a plethora of people involved in this arena and they do not always speak the same language or have the same objective. Despite public health essentially belonging to the hard sciences – that is, it could benefit from working off unassailable evidence and data – it has, like other sciences, come under attack, with scientific knowledge represented as merely an opinion by certain players. The vaccination debates, both pre-COVID-19 on childhood immunisation as well as the recent COVID-19 vaccine confusion, serve as examples of this. Health communication is the part of public health that can train an expert how to break through the clutter and provide clear directions.

Health communication is also well positioned to connect health with its contextual factors and fields, such as politics and policy, social affairs, popular culture, and human routines. For example, the debate around the use of soft drugs like marijuana is mostly a political or social debate. Health science on how a substance impacts the brain, especially if you are under a certain age, is hardly ever the content of public or mediated discourse. Instead, arguments centre around proper policy response (too lenient, too harsh), police enforcement and control, and political and public actors speaking on behalf of an allegedly concerned public. What this example illustrates is that health is a public good that is of equal relevance to the individual and the collective. Hence, smart and effective communication matters. If we were to abrogate our own responsibilities toward our personal and community health – whether that’s the result of lack of knowledge or lack of motivation – then certain power players in politics and corporations could tell us what we should do and how we should stay healthy. Alternatively, we could all be a little smarter about healthy behaviours and living a healthy life. The way we can get there is no different from any other topic, namely amassing knowledge and becoming excited about being involved. In other words, health communication research is an applied science to assist people in understanding their health in general and how they should get, and stay, healthy. It also helps to figure out who should be involved and what actions each should take.

Health communication also happens to be the area that moves health and being healthy into everyday deliberations and conversations. Despite the fact that health is a central criterion for human activity and advancement, it typically matters very little to people who are healthy; everything else, most of all having fun and living well, is more important. Health only becomes people’s top priority, and sometimes their only focus, if they are seriously ill or afraid of becoming incapacitated. The only other people who think about health constantly are those who work in the sector.

For instance, drinking alcohol is not perceived by the average person as a health decision but a social one; most usually they drink with friends, and if they were to stop, they could not be with those people any longer. Moreover, to even consider this a health-related behaviour would require that people admit their drinking is leading them to ill health and risks. So, the typical arguments around health consequences of drinking are usually ignored. Communicating for better health and healthy behaviour patterns is a so-called wicked problem because we are dealing with – and sometimes restricting – someone’s lifestyle choices. The messages ask people to do the opposite of what they want to do and what they are currently doing.

Since health experts tend to operate from an evidence- and outcome-oriented perspective and do not think much about the perspectives of the average member of the public, a health communication program fills the void by focusing on reaching people on their terms in order to make sure people actively contribute to getting healthy and staying healthy.

Moreover, health communication is often perceived to be the same as health promotion or marketing. But unlike commercial communication, which can focus on its specific goal of persuading target groups to purchase a particular brand, the broader challenge for health communication is that it sits next to other public topics within public communication, including social matters such as race and gender relations, environmental health, racism, chauvinism and so on. All these topics about how societies function, or don’t, are not only difficult to communicate, but are also topics some segments of the population may have very different but equally committed beliefs about. Shirking away from the challenge to see the wider implications of disease and health discussions has restricted the communication of health- to data-driven promotional efforts and restricted its teaching to public health departments. In Australia, we still need to do quite a bit more cross-promoting to get the message out that health communication exists as a distinctly different discipline to other areas in public health.

As the degree program director, I am responsible for the curriculum as a whole, as well as the four core units in the program, namely MECO6909: Crisis Communication, MECO6919: Health Communication, MECO6927: Leadership Communication, and MECO6934: Social Issues Marketing. In the very early days, though, there weren’t any core courses on offer that had health or crisis in the title. Courses of that nature were taken as electives from the School of Public Health since the health communication degree was also a cross-listed master’s level degree in the portfolio of postgraduate degrees for Public Health. That was my best understanding of it when I came in. Overall, the degree structure follows the pattern of all MECO postgraduate degrees: a full-time enrolled student completes the master’s degree in three semesters, taking four units per semester. Those must include the four core units, a so-called capstone unit (with a practical or theoretical course choice) and roughly seven electives.

What I believe makes our degree unique is its cross-disciplinary nature, existing on the threshold between health and social sciences. As such, the degree not only offers a vast diversity of university-wide elective course choices, from public health policy to culture and gender studies, but has also implemented these in a model that suggests curriculum choices based on five career trajectories: health communication research, health promotion/marketing, health journalism/writing, health public relations/policy support, and community engagement. Our so-called pathways model assists students with finding interesting and appropriate courses for a smooth study period and helps them think about future career options along the way.

Our graduates include Clare Davies, senior account director at the marketing agency WE Communications; Jodie Wrigley, head of health and social change at the public relations firm Senate SHJ; Michaella Porter, account manager for the health team at WE Communications; Kayla Behayi, an account executive at Cube Public Relations; Jay Munro, vice president of marketing at the tech company WithYouWithMe; Kaitlyn Vette, an epidemiologist at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance; and Jawahir Habib, a programme officer in UNICEF’s Polio Outbreak Team.

Moreover, I have recently adjusted the delivery mode from a purely classroom-based delivery to a blended format where each Master of Health Communication unit is available in both fully online and in-person intensive modes. I expect this will make the degree attractive to already employed groups (approximately 30 to 40 percent of our students are already working in health communication or health communication adjacent fields) and people outside of Sydney, as they now can complete this degree from a distance or by coming to campus for short, concentrated workshops. This works equally for the integrated smaller degrees, the Graduate Diploma and Graduate Certificate, and has potential to advance to standalone courses for micro-credentials and continuing education schemes. In 2021, I also changed Organisational Communication to Leadership Communication, and changed some content and activities in the health communication program overall to make it more relevant for people in health and corporate positions. Needless to say, my research on the communication of health flows into the teaching and so the two domains will remain connected with each other.

What we witness now during the COVID-19 pandemic is that public communication of health and risks needs to be done extremely well, so attracting those tasked with communication in the public service is a prime target. Health and public communication is a growing field, but it grows slowly. If the viral pandemic has taught us anything, it is that health communication is an increasingly important topic, and it should be better understood and done well by a diverse group of practitioners in the health sector. I am hopeful that the status and value of the health communication program will increasingly be recognised, and a degree in health communication will increasingly be seen as relevant and desirable.

We live in a time when everyone can see how important health communication has become, as every country tries to figure out how to get on top of the coronavirus and tell their population how to protect themselves from being infected. When people can see all the ramifications in many countries around the world where people are not following advice, they might take note when a health spokesperson tells them something. Most health communication is run through the government, non-government entities and not-for-profit organisations, with some commercial players as well; it is a very broad field. Considering the mistakes that these various entities (especially governments) have made – and will continue to make – in communicating clear paths out of the pandemic, it is clear that health communication is a vital field with a bright future.