Health

Health matters to all of us, but people tend to think about it in narrow, stigmatizing, and fatalistic ways. Framing can help widen the lens.

Too often, factors and circumstances that shape our health are devalued or ignored. The public, elected officials, and some health providers tend to focus narrowly on lifestyles and behaviors.

Language can entrench and spread misconceptions—or it can unlock alternative ideas and perspectives.

Explore these studies to find frames that help explain the social determinants of health and health equity.

Featured Work

Toolkit

Reframing Oral Health

To elevate oral health issues, experts, advocates, and communications professionals need framing strategies that have the power to dislodge unproductive patterns of thinking and spark new, more...

Publication

Making Public Health Informatics Visible: Communicating an Emerging Field

This report details the challenges that experts in public health informatics face in communicating with professionals who work in the field of public health.

External article

Here’s How Nonprofits Can Get Americans to Fight the Racism Laid Bare by COVID-19

How can social-change communicators best promote conversations about race and racism in ways that help people understand, and get them to act and support solutions that advance equity? Here are...

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Framing Resource

Changing the Narrative Together: Three Effective Strategies for Talking about Youth Mental Health

Three cultural mindsets are currently influencing perceptions about—and limiting action on— youth mental health: Individualism, Fatalism, and Otherism. We need a new narrative that makes it...

Framing Resource

Explaining the Social Determinants of Health

Here are helpful things to keep in mind when you’re trying to explain why some demographic groups experience better or worse health outcomes than others.

Framing Resource

Talking about Health Equity

Here are three sample definitions that use the phrases “fair and full” or “fair and just,” which can complement or replace the word equity.

Framing Resource

Framing with Data

Here are a few framing guidelines to keep in mind when you are using numbers.

Toolkit

Building Family Confidence in the COVID-19 Vaccine: Framing Strategies for School Nurses

This toolkit offers evidence-based tips and techniques to support more productive conversations and communications about getting kids vaccinated.

Report

Public Thinking About Care Work: Encouraging Trends, Critical Challenges

Has the salience of care and the respect for frontline workers seen during the pandemic stayed high or dwindled? What we find is both encouraging and a call to action.

Report

Framing Community Safety: Guidance for Effective Communication

Framing Community Safety is a guide for nonprofits, community-based organizations, public agencies, and others who want to communicate more effectively with the public about community-led efforts...

Report

Framing Community Safety: A Messaging Brief

This brief provides short guidance on how to reframe safety within communities when using the terms community safety, public health approach, and social determinants of health and safety.

Framing Resource

Health first: communicating about health and obesity in Scotland

This guide, produced for Public Health Scotland, provides practical tips and advice for anyone communicating about health and obesity in Scotland.

Report

Reframing the Conversation about Child and Adolescent Vaccinations

The purpose of this brief is to equip physicians, advocates, and public health communicators with the strategies necessary to effectively build understanding of and support for child and...

Report

Talking about children’s health in a cost of living crisis

This guide, produced for Impact on Urban Health and partners, sets out how to drive action on children’s health as we respond to the cost of living crisis in the UK.

Report

Reframing Farming: Strategies for expanding thinking about agriculture

As most of us now lack personal experience with farming, we also lack ways to understand what farming involves, who it involves, what is required to stay in business, and how it affects our...