Leaflets, information sheets and written materials designed to influence people′s health-related behaviours often fail to achieve their aims. To improve such written materials we need to understand: (i) how people read and process information, (ii) how to design persuasive messages, (iii) how to make written text easy to use and (iv) how to change behaviour. Writing for Health Communication: An Evidence-Based Guide for Professionals is a practical guide to producing effective written materials. The book presents easy-to-understand, evidence-based guidance on providing information, presenting persuasive messages and promoting behaviour change. Topics include: - Message framing, - Use of fear appeals, - Tailoring messages, - Using graphics, - Behaviour change Each chapter is illustrated with examples - including both good and bad practice and covering a range of health topics. For students and professionals in healthcare, health psychology, health education and promotion, and public health, Writing for Health Communication: An Evidence-Based Guide for Professionals is an invaluable guide to best practice.

Strong communication skills are required of today's health care practitioners. This guide contains practical advice on a broad range of essential communication skills for health-care practitioners.

How and why the idea of wellness holds such rhetorical—and harmful—power. In Why Wellness Sells, Colleen Derkatch examines why the concept of wellness holds such rhetorical power in contemporary culture. Public interest in wellness is driven by two opposing philosophies of health that cycle into and amplify each other: restoration, where people use natural health products to restore themselves to prior states of wellness; and enhancement, where people strive for maximum wellness by optimizing their body's systems and functions. Why Wellness Sells tracks the tension between these two ideas of wellness across a variety of sources, including interviews, popular and social media, advertising, and online activism. Derkatch examines how wellness manifests across multiple domains, where being "well" means different things, ranging from a state of pre-illness to an empowered act of good consumer-citizenship, from physical or moral purification to sustenance and care, and from harm reduction to optimization. Along the way, Derkatch demonstrates that the idea of wellness may promise access to the good life, but it serves primarily as a strategy for coping with a devastating and overwhelming present. Drawing on scholarship in the rhetoric of health and medicine, the health and medical humanities, and related fields, Derkatch offers a nuanced account of how language, belief, behavior, experience, and persuasion collide to produce and promote wellness, one of the most compelling—and harmful—concepts that govern contemporary Western life. She explains that wellness has become so pervasive in the United States and Canada because it is an ever-moving, and thus unachievable, goal. The concept of wellness entrenches an individualist model of health as a personal responsibility, when collectivist approaches would more readily serve the health and well-being of whole populations.

Promotes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of health communication According to the Joint Commission, over 75% of all serious medical errors in this country result from miscommunication. Based in these adverse realities and the author philosophy that communication is a clinical skill integral to effective health care delivery, this comprehensive text addresses thetheories and abilities needed by all health care providers. The only text written specifically for students of nursing, medicine, physical therapy,pharmacy, dentistry, physician assistants and opticians, this book incorporates recommendations for specific multimedia, suggestions for class discussion and interactive case studies to provide a rich and multi-perspective learning experience for gaining optimal expertise in effective health communication The author underscores the importance of developing and maintaining successful relationships with patients, peers, and colleagues as a cornerstone ofeffective health care outcomes. With an emphasis on interactive learning, the text utilizescommunication theories to analyze verbal and non-verbalbehaviors in diverse health care contexts and assess which are more effective and why. Summaries at the end of each chapter discuss health communicationoutcomes. Chapters cover interpersonal and gendered communication, provider-patient communication, intercultural communication, organizationalcommunication, team communication, malpractice, palliative care, end-of-life communication, and many other topics. Key Features: Fosters a patient-centered, interdisciplinary, multidimensional learning experience for health care students Recommends experiential learning using videos, films, and related discussion exercises Presents case study role-plays Provides companion case study resource to enhance learning objectives

Leaflets, information sheets and written materials designed to influence people′s health-related behaviours often fail to achieve their aims. To improve such written materials we need to understand: (i) how people read and process information, (ii) how to design persuasive messages, (iii) how to make written text easy to use and (iv) how to change behaviour. Writing for Health Communication: An Evidence-Based Guide for Professionals is a practical guide to producing effective written materials. The book presents easy-to-understand, evidence-based guidance on providing information, presenting persuasive messages and promoting behaviour change. Topics include: - Message framing, - Use of fear appeals, - Tailoring messages, - Using graphics, - Behaviour change Each chapter is illustrated with examples - including both good and bad practice and covering a range of health topics. For students and professionals in healthcare, health psychology, health education and promotion, and public health, Writing for Health Communication: An Evidence-Based Guide for Professionals is an invaluable guide to best practice.

Writing Scientific Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders is a comprehensive guide to the preparation and publication of research papers for researchers in communication sciences and disorders. Individual chapters address the structure, content, and style of the introduction, method, results, and discussion sections of a research paper. The balance of the text examines the writing process, including the nuts and bolts of preparing tables and graphs, reviewing different voices and grammar issues, editing your own work, working with editors and peer reviewers, and getting started toward becoming a productive writer. Each topic is illustrated with informative examples, with clear, direct, and often humorous discussion of what makes the examples good or bad. Writing is essential in nearly every profession and particularly in communication sciences and disorders, where researchers must be able to express complex ideas to a variety of audiences--from colleagues to members of health care teams to clients and family members. Therefore, competency in written expression is required for certification and entry into clinical practice in communication sciences and disorders. Writing Scientific Research in Communication Sciences and Disorders will be a valuable supplementary text for undergraduate and graduate students in courses that include writing assignments and critical assessment of research literature, such as research methods and evidence-based clinical methods courses, as well as in thesis and dissertation preparation. Researchers looking for a guide to help improve their own writing will also find this text to be an invaluable resource that answers the big and little questions that arise in preparing manuscripts.

Health Communication: From Theory to Practice is a much needed resource for the fast-growing field of health communication. It combines a comprehensive introduction to current issues, theories, and special topics in health communication with a hands-on guide to program development and implementation. While the book is designed for students, professionals and organizations with no significant field experience, it also includes advanced topics for health communication practitioners, public health experts, researchers, and health care providers with an interest in this field.