[afro-nets] Innovative ideas needed (3)

[Madeleine Anne Decker <omsdoc@oms-mz.org>]

Innovative ideas needed (3)
---------------------------

Dear Colleagues,

Many of you are having concerns about the access to the article.
Living in a lower-income country myself, Mozambique, I would not
send links that are not accessible one way or another.

For the list of journals available in the BMJ Publishing group
see http://www.bmjjournals.com/

For the details and conditions for a Free access for developing
countries, see
http://www.bmjjournals.com/subscriptions/countries.shtml

You register once and you will have full access to the articles
afterwards.

These journals can also be accessed for free through HINARI. For
the list of journals available through HINARI, please check
http://www.healthinternetwork.org/src/j_list.php
and for registering, go to
http://www.healthinternetwork.org/src/en/registration.php?lang=en

There are also a lot of journals available for free at
http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/.

But there again, you may have to register once before accessing
the articles.

Have a good day,
Madeleine Anne Decker
mailto:omsdoc@oms-mz.org

--
Here is the article below

SPEAKER'S CORNER

Innovative ideas needed for timely and effective public health
information dissemination

Bernard C K Choi
Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Public Health
Agency of Canada, AL no 6701A, 120 Colonnade Road, Ottawa, On-
tario K1A 1B4, Canada; Department of Public Health Sciences,
University of Toronto; and Department of Epidemiology and Commu-
nity Medicine, University of Ottawa, Canada;
Bernard_Choi@phac-aspc.gc.ca

Keywords: information

Scientific findings must be published in accessible formats for
the public to use. One common practice is to put information on
line. However, web based information may be neither timely nor
effective. There are information users who do not have access to
the internet. Even among those with internet access, it may be
difficult to reach a specific piece of information on a specific
web site. For example, a Google search on the internet using the
key words "health + information" brought 103 000 000 web sites.1
If a person spends on average only one minute on each web site,
it will takes 588 years to go through all existing web sites as-
suming an eight hour workday, 365 days a year.

Innovative ideas are therefore needed for timely and effective
information dissemination. Six ideas are presented here, for the
purpose of stimulating further collective thinking to develop
and evaluate these and some more ideas.


IDEA 1
Public health indicators may be developed for reporting to the
general public after the television news, one indicator a day.2
For example, after the news, before the weather forecasts, the
broadcaster can talk about air pollution trends in the past five
years, causing predicted problems of asthma in the next three
years. The general public is not expected to be watching these
programmes every day, but with time their awareness and knowl-
edge will increase.


IDEA 2
New synthetic indices for public health may be developed to dis-
seminate public health information in a highly summary format.2-
4 This may be similar to the Dow Jones Index or the Consumer
Price Index in the economic markets that help users to make de-
cisions in their economic activities.


IDEA 3
New user friendly information dissemination tools may be in-
vented. For example, decision makers at Xerox's Palo Alto Re-
search Center, California, USA, check the company's share price
by watching an office fountain, the water flow of which is con-
trolled through an ethernet connection to a computer with the
latest stock data. Flow strengthens when the price does.5


IDEA 4
Forms of entertainment may be used to make public health infor-
mation accessible to various audiences. For example, a group of
experts at an occupational health workshop for Latin America
suggested such innovative ways as writing folk songs on the
health effects of pesticides for radio broadcast, and organising
concerts with themes on healthy practices.6 Theatrical perform-
ances such as plays have been used to disseminate public health
messages.7,8


IDEA 5
Statistics may be converted into some form of events to which
people can relate. For example, in Canada there are about 167
456 deaths attributable to chronic diseases in a year. The
Chronic Disease Clock was developed by Public Health Agency of
Canada's Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control to
disseminate this information in real time, and is available on
the web site.9 It is a digital clock that shows "chronic disease
related deaths so far this year" (when checked on 11 Feb 2005 at
9.30 am, it registered 18 839, 18 840, and so on), and "chronic
disease related deaths so far today as of 12 00 midnight" (it
registered 187, 188, and so on). The user can see increases in
chronic disease deaths right before their eyes, as there is one
chronic disease death in about three minutes, 24 hours a day,
365 days a year.


IDEA 6
Information may be converted into mind-boggling, eye-catching,
attention-grabbing, or breath-taking forms. For example, figures
released by the World Health Organisation in 2003 showed that
road traffic incidents caused 1.2 million deaths in a year, mak-
ing it the ninth leading cause of death. Commenting on the 43
000 traffic deaths in a year in the US, the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration told the New York Times that "los-
ing the equivalent of a fully loaded airliner every other day is
clearly not acceptable".10

It is hoped that the six ideas presented here will lead to other
innovative ideas for more timely and effective information dis-
semination.


REFERENCES

1. Google. http://www.google.com/ (accessed on 11 Feb 2005).
2. Choi BCK. Perspectives on epidemiologic surveillance in the
21st century. Chron Dis Canada 1998;19:145-51.
3. Choi BCK, Pak AWP, Ottoson JM. Understanding the basic con-
cepts of public health surveillance. J Epidemiol Community
Health 2002;56:402.[Free Full Text]
4. Campostrini S, McQueen DV. Chapter 15. Creating a synthetic
behavioural risk factor index to assess trends in surveillance
data. In: McQueen DV, Puska P, eds. Global behavioral risk fac-
tor surveillance. New York, Kluwer Academic/Plenum 2003:209-20.
5. National Post. Sowing PARC's next revolution: Xerox squan-
dered the 1970s innovations of its Palo Alto Research Center,
but hopes to make amends. 21 Apr 1999, page C13.
http://financialpost.infomart.ca/ar/ar_form.php (accessed 8 Mar
2004).
6. Choi BCK, Eijkemans GJM, Tennassee LM. Prioritization of oc-
cupational sentinel health events for workplace health and haz-
ard surveillance: the Pan American Health Organization experi-
ence. J Occup Environ Med 2001;43:147-57.[Medline]
7. University of Alberta. Express News. Play puts death in the
spotlight.
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/expressnews/articles/news.cfm
?p_ID=285&s=a (accessed 8 Mar 2004).
8. Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. WorkPlays set for
staging in Edmonton and Calgary.
http://www.aupe.org/in_the_news/member_updates/MUjan2604.htm
(accessed 8 Mar 2004).
9. Chronic Disease Clock. Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention
and Control, Public Health Agency of Canada. http://www.phac-
aspc.gc.ca/ccdpc-cpcmc/index_e.html (accessed on 11 Feb 2005).
10.. New York Times. Editor's most striking quotes of 2003. The
Epidemiology Monitor 2004;25:7.