scholarly journals Picture of a pandemic: visual aids in the COVID-19 crisis

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-485
Author(s):  
Ryoko Hamaguchi ◽  
Saman Nematollahi ◽  
Daniel J Minter
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Health Literacy ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Health Information ◽  
Public Health Advocacy

Abstract As a global crisis, COVID-19 has underscored the challenge of disseminating evidence-based public health recommendations amidst a rapidly evolving, often uncensored information ecosystem—one fueled in part by an unprecedented degree of connected afforded through social media. In this piece, we explore an underdiscussed intersection between the visual arts and public health, focusing on the use of validated infographics and other forms of visual communication to rapidly disseminate accurate public health information during the COVID-19 pandemic. We illustrate our arguments through our own experience in creating a validated infographic for patients, now disseminated through social media and other outlets across the world in nearly 20 translations. Visual communication offers a creative and practical medium to bridge critical health literacy gaps, empower diverse patient communities through evidence-based information and facilitate public health advocacy during this pandemic and the ‘new normal’ that lies ahead.

Essential Dental Public Health

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blánaid Daly ◽  
Paul Batchelor ◽  
Elizabeth Treasure ◽  
Richard Watt
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Dental Public Health ◽  
Oral Health Promotion ◽  
Dental Practitioners ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Based Medicine

Public health is a key concern of modern dental practitioners as they continue to play a vital role in the health of populations across the world. The second edition of Essential Dental Public Health identifies the links between clinical practice and public health with a strong emphasis on evidence-based medicine. Fully revised and updated for a second edition, this textbook is split into four parts covering all the need-to-know aspects of the subject: the principles of dental public health, oral epidemiology, prevention and oral health promotion, and the governance and organization of health services. Essential Dental Public Health is an ideal introduction to the field for dentistry undergraduates, as well as being a helpful reference for postgraduates and practitioners.

scholarly journals COVID-19 Misinformation Online and Health Literacy: A Brief Overview

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (15) ◽  
pp. 8091
Author(s):  
Salman Bin Naeem ◽  
Maged N. Kamel Boulos
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Health Literacy ◽  
Information Content ◽  
Digital Health ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
The World ◽  
Synergistic Approach ◽  
Viral Nature

Low digital health literacy affects large percentages of populations around the world and is a direct contributor to the spread of COVID-19-related online misinformation (together with bots). The ease and ‘viral’ nature of social media sharing further complicate the situation. This paper provides a quick overview of the magnitude of the problem of COVID-19 misinformation on social media, its devastating effects, and its intricate relation to digital health literacy. The main strategies, methods and services that can be used to detect and prevent the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, including machine learning-based approaches, health literacy guidelines, checklists, mythbusters and fact-checkers, are then briefly reviewed. Given the complexity of the COVID-19 infodemic, it is very unlikely that any of these approaches or tools will be fully effective alone in stopping the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. Instead, a mixed, synergistic approach, combining the best of these strategies, methods, and services together, is highly recommended in tackling online health misinformation, and mitigating its negative effects in COVID-19 and future pandemics. Furthermore, techniques and tools should ideally focus on evaluating both the message (information content) and the messenger (information author/source) and not just rely on assessing the latter as a quick and easy proxy for the trustworthiness and truthfulness of the former. Surveying and improving population digital health literacy levels are also essential for future infodemic preparedness.

scholarly journals Identifying the Weak Foundation of Public Health Resilience forNational Disaster Policy in Indonesia’s Mid-term DevelopmentAgenda 2015–2019: A Policy Content Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gita Miranda Warsito ◽  
Meiwita Budiharsana ◽  
Sharyn Burns
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Disaster Policy ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Development Agenda ◽  
The World ◽  
Policy Content ◽  
National Disaster

Indonesia is one of the most susceptible nations toward natural disasters in the world. Since 1992, approximately 37 tsunami incidents have occurred inIndonesia, with at least 1,244 cases of natural disasters during 2018. Despite the overwhelming impact of disasters on Indonesia, Public Health Resilience,as an approach to disaster countermeasures, has been poorly elaborated in Indonesia’s development agenda (National Mid-term Development Plan (NMDP),or Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Nasional (RPJMN), 2015 - 2019). By utilizing the method of policy content analysis, this study aimed to analyzethe policy background of Public Health Resilience against disasters in the NMDP 2015 - 2019 and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA)’s, orBadan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana (BNPB),Strategic Plan 2015 - 2019. The results showed that the NMDP 2015 - 2019 and NDMA‘s Strategic Plan2015 - 2019 lack the scientific background for Public Health Resilience building in Indonesia. Enhancing the scientific background in these plans will enhancefocus on evidence-based Public Health Resilience establishment.

scholarly journals Analysis of social media use by European plastic surgery societies: A missing link for #PlasticSurgery

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. e0258120
Author(s):  
Sebastian P. Nischwitz ◽  
Hanna Luze ◽  
Katharina Rauch ◽  
Benjamin T. Lemelman ◽  
Albrecht Heine-Geldern ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Plastic Surgery ◽  
Retrospective Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
P Value ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
American Society

Purpose The field of Plastic Surgery is prominent on social media around the world. Board certified plastic surgeons and societies of plastic surgery play a role in providing accurate, evidence-based information to the public, patients, and colleagues. The aim of this study was to explore the use of social media by European Plastic Surgery Societies. Methods and materials A retrospective analysis of the presence and activity of European Plastic Surgery Societies on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram was conducted between December 12th 2018 and December 12th 2019. The results have been compared to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Results Twenty, eleven and nine European societies yielded an active account on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram respectively. Only seven European societies had an account on all three platforms and were therefore considered polypresent. The amount of followers of those seven societies was significantly higher than of the others (p-value = 0.02). Their activity yielded significantly more posts on Facebook (p-value = 0.02). The American Society of Plastic Surgeons had more followers on all three platforms than all European societies combined. Conclusion Social media are still rather unexploited by European Plastic Surgery Societies. A tendency towards increased visibility can be observed, yet a higher penetration is required to further educate and engage through social media. The quantitative data provided serve as reasonable foundation for further studies and a guide for growth of #PlasticSurgery.

scholarly journals #Healthy Selfies: Exploration of Health Topics on Instagram (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sachin Muralidhara ◽  
Michael J. Paul
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Substance Use ◽  
Topic Model ◽  
Public Health Research ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Image Sharing ◽  
Public Data ◽  
Public Health Information ◽  
Social Media Platforms

BACKGROUND Social media provides a complementary source of information for public health surveillance. The dominate data source for this type of monitoring is the microblogging platform Twitter, which is convenient due to the free availability of public data. Less is known about the utility of other social media platforms, despite their popularity. OBJECTIVE This work aims to characterize the health topics that are prominently discussed in the image-sharing platform Instagram, as a step toward understanding how this data might be used for public health research. METHODS The study uses a topic modeling approach to discover topics in a dataset of 96,426 Instagram posts containing hashtags related to health. We use a polylingual topic model, initially developed for datasets in different natural languages, to model different modalities of data: hashtags, caption words, and image tags automatically extracted using a computer vision tool. RESULTS We identified 47 health-related topics in the data (kappa=.77), covering ten broad categories: acute illness, alternative medicine, chronic illness and pain, diet, exercise, health care & medicine, mental health, musculoskeletal health and dermatology, sleep, and substance use. The most prevalent topics were related to diet (8,293/96,426; 8.6% of posts) and exercise (7,328/96,426; 7.6% of posts). CONCLUSIONS A large and diverse set of health topics are discussed in Instagram. The extracted image tags were generally too coarse and noisy to be used for identifying posts but were in some cases accurate for identifying images relevant to studying diet and substance use. Instagram shows potential as a source of public health information, though limitations in data collection and metadata availability may limit its use in comparison to platforms like Twitter.

Public health advocacy for the prevention of NCDs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Rayner ◽  
Kremlin Wickramasinghe ◽  
Julianne Williams ◽  
Karen McColl ◽  
Shanthi Mendis
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Health Advocacy ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Governmental Agencies ◽  
Public Health Advocacy ◽  
Future Potential

This chapter highlights the need for sustained advocacy to address the challenges posed by the sociopolitical landscape relating to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as described in Chapters 4 and 5. It focuses on advocacy carried out by civil society (non-governmental agencies, charities, academia, and professional organizations). The chapter introduces different tools, tactics, and techniques to influence the setting and implementation of decisions that affect people’s lives. It provides case studies to share the experience of advocacy work carried out to protect against unhealthy diets. The chapter also discusses the role of social media in advocacy and the future potential to contribute towards creating a healthy environment. It concludes by providing a number of recommendations to increase the effectiveness of public health advocacy for the prevention of NCDs.

scholarly journals Public Health Communication and Engagement on Social Media during the COVID-19 Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Teichmann ◽  
Sean Nossek ◽  
Aengus Bridgman ◽  
Peter John Loewen ◽  
Taylor Owen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Mixed Method ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Evidence Based Practices ◽  
Public Health Communication ◽  
Government Communication ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Cross Platform ◽  
Method Approach

Social media provides governments the opportunity to directly communicate with their constituents. During a pandemic, reaching as many citizens as possible with health messaging is critical to reducing the spread of the disease. This study evaluates efforts to spread healthcare information by Canadian local, provincial, and federal governments during the first five months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We collect all health-related communications coming from government accounts on Facebook and Twitter and analyze the data using a nested mixed method approach. We first identify quantifiable features linked with citizen engagement, before subsequently performing content analysis on outlier posts. We make two critical contributions to existing knowledge about government communication, particularly during public health crises. We identify cross-platform variations in strategy effectiveness and draw attention to specific, evidence-based practices that can increase engagement with government health information.

scholarly journals Building a Digital Tool for the Adoption of the World Health Organization’s Antenatal Care Recommendations: Methodological Intersection of Evidence, Clinical Logic, and Digital Technology (Preprint)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samira M Haddad ◽  
Renato T Souza ◽  
Jose Guilherme Cecatti ◽  
Maria Barreix ◽  
Tigist Tamrat ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Clinical Practice ◽  
Decision Support ◽  
Antenatal Care ◽  
Digital Systems ◽  
World Health ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Data Dictionary ◽  
The World

BACKGROUND One of the key mandates of the World Health Organization (WHO) is to develop guidelines, defined as “a document containing recommendations for clinical practice or public health policy.” Guidelines represent the global standard for information sources shaping clinical practice and public health policies. Despite the rigorous development process and the value of guidelines for setting standards, implementing such standards within local contexts and at the point of care is a well-documented challenge. Digital technologies enable agile information management and may facilitate the adaptation of guidelines to diverse settings of health services delivery. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to detail the systematic and iterative process involved in transforming the WHO Antenatal Care (ANC) guidelines into a digital decision-support and patient-record application for routine use in primary health care settings, known as the WHO digital ANC module. METHODS The WHO convened a team of clinical and digital health experts to develop the WHO digital ANC module as a tool to assist health care professionals in the implementation of WHO evidence-based recommendations for pregnant women. The WHO digital ANC module’s creation included the following steps: defining a minimum viable product (MVP), developing clinical workflows and algorithms, algorithm testing, developing a data dictionary, and the creation of a user interface or application development. The overall process of development took approximately 1 year to reach a stable prototype and to finalize the underlying content requirements of the data dictionary and decision support algorithms. RESULTS The first output is a reference software reflecting the generic WHO ANC guideline content, known as the WHO digital ANC module. Within it, all actionable ANC recommendations have related data fields and algorithms to confirm whether the associated task was performed. WHO recommendations that are not carried out by the health care worker are saved as pending tasks on a woman’s health record, and those that are adequately fulfilled trigger messages with positive reinforcement. The second output consists of the structured documentation of the different components which contributed to the development of the WHO digital ANC module, such as the data dictionary and clinical decision support workflows. CONCLUSIONS This is a novel approach to facilitate the adoption and adaptation of recommendations through digital systems at the health service delivery level. It is expected that the WHO digital ANC module will support the implementation of evidence-based practices and provide information for monitoring and surveillance; however, further evidence is needed to understand how the WHO digital ANC module impacts the implementation of WHO recommendations. Further, the module’s implementation will inform the WHO’s ongoing efforts to create a pathway to adaptive and integrated (Smart) Guidelines in Digital Systems to improve health system quality, coverage, and accountability.

scholarly journals Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling of Indonesian Public Conversation about COVID-19 Epidemics on Twitter

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-30
Author(s):  
Muhammad Habibi ◽  
Adri Priadana ◽  
Muhammad Rifqi Ma’arif
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Topic Modeling ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
World Health ◽  
The Public ◽  
Response Strategies ◽  
Existing Problems ◽  
The World ◽  
Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in more than six million confirmed cases and more than 371,000 deaths globally on June 1, 2020. The incident sparked a flood of scientific research to help society deal with the virus, both inside and outside the medical domain. Research related to public health analysis and public conversations about the spread of COVID-19 on social media is one of the highlights of researchers in the world. People can analyze information from social media as supporting data about public health. Analyzing public conversations will help the relevant authorities understand public opinion and information gaps between them and the public, helping them develop appropriate emergency response strategies to address existing problems in the community during the pandemic and provide information on the population's emotions in different contexts. However, research related to the analysis of public health and public conversations was so far conducted only through supervised analysis of textual data. In this study, we aim to analyze specifically the sentiment and topic modeling of Indonesian public conversations about the COVID-19 on Twitter using the NLP technique. We applied some methods to analyze the sentiment to obtain the best classification method. In this study, the topic modeling was carried out unsupervised using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The results of this study reveal that the most frequently discussed topic related to the COVID-19 pandemic is economic issues.

scholarly journals Mobile Health Applications for Osteoporosis Support Available on the Market: A Systematic Review

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
Reza Safdari ◽  
Majid Alikhani ◽  
Foziyeh Tahmasbi ◽  
Zohreh Javanmard ◽  
Saeedeh Heydarian
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Improve Patient Care ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
World Health ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Local Market ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Visual Aids ◽  
Health Warnings ◽  
The World

Introduction: The use of mobile applications (apps) become widespread and Provide many benefits especially in healthcare. According to the World Health Organization, osteoporosis is one of the most common diseases of elderly in the world. Like other chronic conditions, disease self-management can prove fruitful. Using a mobile application for Osteoporosis can improve patient care and self-management by encouraging patients to take a more active role in their health.Material and Methods: This study presents a systematic review of mHealth applications, available on Google Play Store, Bazaar market (as a local market) and also Apple App Store, for both the English and Persian speakers. The assessment criteria, including content, visual aids, reminders, health warnings, social and design of selected apps, were tested during July 2019.Results: Reviewing the 19 included applications showed that the most and least focus of apps content was on exercise with 84% repetition and the osteoporosis fracture that no program addressed this issue separately. Findings on reminders, health warnings, and visual aids were not very encouraging (available in 11% apps). Reminders were more common in English-speaking apps than Persian-speaking ones, and Visual aids, one of the benefits of mobile apps over paper logbooks, were provided only in2 apps. The opportunity to share data in social networks was available in 26% of apps, and in the design section, most of the apps have no significant flaws, but 74% of cases did not provide any clear instructions required for the elderly.Conclusion:The review shows that there are rather few products on offer and the ones that are available display low quality, poor performance, and evidence-based information is also insufficiently used. Further efforts are required to collect data that will support the design of validated evidence-based educational functions for mHealth apps.

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