Published: 06/05/2026
By Jamie Hansen, Global Health Communication Manager
As the public faces “monstrous volumes of health information” subject to manipulation, falsification, and misuse, expert health communication is more essential than ever. Everyone working in health is a potential communicator, but training, research and resourcing are needed to match the scale of the challenge, argue two health communication experts in a new comment in Nature Health.
The commentary is co-authored by Gabriella Stern, a veteran journalist who led communications at the World Health Organization (WHO) during the COVID-19 pandemic and now serves in advisory roles at Harvard and the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), and Neha Mukherjee, a fourth-year medical student and early career reporter who recently completed a year-long Global Health Media Fellowship based at CIGH and CNN.
Mukherjee and Stern first collaborated on WHO communications during Mukherjee’s time as a media fellow.
“After working with Gabby on the WHO communications team, we began having conversations that spanned our intergenerational and interdisciplinary perspectives. We learned that even with our differences, we could always find common ground. That is part of what we want to impart to people who read our commentary,” said Mukherjee.
Mukherjee and Stern set out to combine their intergenerational experiences and perspectives to highlight time-tested and emerging best practices.
“In this Comment, we offer a perspective shift that, we believe, can help to move the field from flailing and (often) failing towards useful solutions, greater finesse in the practice of communications and, ultimately, more success and better health outcomes for more people,” Stern and Mukherjee write.
Their recommendations include:
- Treat audiences as partners: Communicators should accompany audiences on their journey towards better health, they write. “Get to know them, speak their language (literally and figuratively) and bring patience to patients.”
- Encourage intellectual diversity while avoiding false equivalencies: Communicators should know their limitations, test assumptions and be exposed to a wide range of sources, the authors write. However, the authors caution that communicators should not treat all data and evidence as equal or fall victim to the “false equivalence fallacy” in which medically inaccurate or clearly false opinions are given equal weight as scientifically accurate information. “In some settings, clear, crisp statements demonstrating the value of medical interventions are imperative,” they write.
- Invest in communications research, pedagogy, training and strategy: Bring rigor to health communication by prioritizing and investing in the study of how people consume health information, how they can distinguish between high-and low-quality information, what factors shape health-seeking behaviours, and how front-line communicators and behind-the-scenes communications advisers can contribute in the most helpful ways. Invest in the training and empowerment of communications officers working behind the scenes. Getting health communications right is a finely developed skillset, as is the strategy behind disseminating and analyzing the impact of communications.
They also highlight common missteps to avoid in health communication, including:
- Lack of empathy
- A dearth of voices from those with lived experience
- Overuse of jargon, data and numbers over anecdotes and examples
- Talking down to the audience
- Inability of experts to embrace ambiguity
- Reluctance to incorporate behavioural science in communications decisions and evaluation
- A digital generation gap between communications leaders and young digital natives
Explore this issue further in our upcoming webinar, “Health Communication During Chaotic Times,” with the authors and other health communication experts.