Greek literature is littered with messengers who meet grisly ends for being the bearers of bad news and, even today, unscripted or poorly managed communications can have devastating health outcomes.
The lethal fury of such tyrants from mythology can be substituted with unresponsive patients and communities to emphasise the need to deliver the message with an acute awareness about how it might be received.
Decoding the genome may well appear to be a simple task when ranged against deciphering the intricacies and volatility of human behaviours that need to be addressed to improve the reach and efficacy of medicines and health awareness programmes.
Changing behaviour is the big challenge facing governments, healthcare ecosystems and industry, and the febrile nature of its response to the recent pandemic illustrated the difficulty of achieving connections across a spectrum of behaviour ranging from rapid uptake of vaccines and social distancing to a reluctance to engage with either, often with tragic consequences.
Altering or nudging patients’ behaviour for their own good is a complex undertaking – a journey through a landscape riven with personal, social, cultural, religious, economic and political fault lines. The imperative to bridge the potential chasms between messaging and understanding is now a strategic priority for the World Health Organization (WHO) and for organisations that want to maximise the efficacy of their products.
With budgetary constraints squeezing every factor from R&D to healthcare infrastructure, the quest to improve societal health is critical. But it is a far more demanding exercise than issuing instructions and slogans.
“Behaviour is clearly a determinant of health and well-being, from preventing ill health to managing chronic conditions, but we have to recognise that this is complex and about a lot more than advocating supposedly common sense approaches,” says Alicia Hughes, Senior Scientist at Sprout Health Solutions, which specialises in patient insights, research and action plans.
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