“Reporting Health for behavioural change”

The WHO Country Office in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare and Ministry of Information and Communication Infrastructure has, concluded a two-day training on health reporting for health journalists and news editors. A total of thirty participants drawn from the Association of Health Journalists attended the training. The WHO Representative, Dr. Desta A. Tiruneh, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Cherno Barry, and the Director of Information Services at the Ministry of Information and Communication Infrastructure, Mrs. Aisha Davies, attended the opening. In their remarks at the opening session, they all acknowledged the importance of health communication in promoting health of individuals and communities and the role of journalists in facilitating this. They also reiterated their commitment to work together to promote health reporting in the Gambia.

Under the theme “reporting health for behavior change”, the overall objective of the training is to build capacity of journalists to report health issues for behavior change. This is a gradual shift from the traditional way of disseminating or sharing health information with the public to reporting health issues with a “human face”. During the two-day exercise, participants were:

• updated on key health developments and milestones at country, regional and global levels
• oriented on the application of the Single Overarching Communications Outcomes approach, within the context of WHO Communications tools and framework, to guide and enhance health reporting for behavior change
• oriented on social determinants of health and universal health coverage to better understand the linkages between health and other sectors
• guided on accessing and utilizing WHO information products for effective health reporting
• guided on resource mobilization initiatives
• updated on risk communication

At the end of the training, the following key recommendations were put forward for consideration.

1. WHO to consider rolling out this type of training to cover more journalists, including senior editors and media executives
2. To enhance health reporting for behavior change, health authorities, WHO and other partners to consider facilitating movements of journalists should they wish to conduct in depth audience analysis and engagement at grassroots levels
3. Health journalists to proactively engage health and other sectors to enhance better health reporting
4. Health professionals and authorities to regularly share health information with journalists
5. WHO and the Ministry of Health to recognize work of health reporters by organizing annual health journalism award and inviting outstanding health reporters to cover international health events