The Health Communication Division invites all ICA members to attend its preconference ahead of the ICA meetings in Singapore. The preconference is hosted by the Singapore Health Promotion Board and the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. It will be held at the Health Promotion Board (HPB) premises in the compound of the Singapore General Hospital on 22 June.
Health communication campaigns have been deployed in many countries in Asia, Australia, and Southeast Asia to address a variety of health issues from infectious and chronic diseases to improvements in reproductive health and reductions in maternal and child mortality and morbidity. Systematic, evidence-based, theoretically-driven, locally-focused health communication campaigns have the capacity to achieve population-level change in this region.
The preconference will be organized around recent reviews of theoretical perspectives and data on the success of health communication campaigns and on differences in how health communication programs are funded, planned, implemented, monitored and evaluated. It will promote the transfer of research to practice among ICA members and health communication practitioners and scholars from Pakistan to the Philippines and China to Australia.
Plenary sessions will cover the latest evidence on the role of mass media in international health campaigns, importance of data in guiding health communication, corporate and individual responsibility in obesity prevention, the politics of health campaigns, and public will in health communication. Participants from the region will present their research in short presentation sessions and a poster session. Topics addressed will include media and community approaches to promoting child and reproductive health, health communication in cancer survivorship, HIV/STD prevention, and diabetes education, campaigns on tobacco, influenza, and obesity prevention, issues in health literacy, Internet health communication, and normative approaches in health communication. Meals and two-way transportation from the main conference venue to the HPB premises will be provided.
