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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 30, 2004
Healthwise Provides Expert Answers to Medical Questions
For Health Communication Professionals
New Service is Joint Effort of Health Communication Partnership and INFO Project
BALTIMORE — A new weekly service now available to health communication professionals provides expert medical knowledge about a variety of public health issues to help them design more effective communication programs. Healthwise is a joint product of the Health Communication Partnership (HCP) and the INFO (Information and Knowledge for Optimal Health) Project, both based at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Communication Programs (CCP) and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Healthwise researches and summarizes answers to questions about public health problems in reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, child survival and tuberculosis, malaria. It focuses on the medical aspects of these problems to help enhance and inform health communication programs with expert health knowledge. As HCP's Associate Director of Health Sciences, Youssef Tawfik , MD , MPH, is responsible for facilitating Healthwise questions and answers in a brief yet thorough manner.
“We hope that health communication programs will benefit from having a credible source of medical expertise based on state of the art scientific information and evidence that are provided in simple and easy to understand language. Trying to find a simple answer to a medical question can be time-consuming and confusing,” said Jose Rimon II, Director of the Health Communication Partnership and faculty member at the School.
Sample initial questions include determining the health risks of getting malaria when pregnant and the role of zinc supplementation in managing childhood diarrhea. Questions can be sent to healthwise@jhuccp.org and users can sign up to receive each week's installment of Healthwise by visiting www.hcpartnership.org or writing directly to healthwise-subscribe@hcpartnership.org. Healthwise is accessible at both www.hcpartnership.org and www.infoforhealth.org, and an archive of past questions and answers can be viewed at www.hcpartnership.org/Healthwise/archive.php.
HCP is a global communication initiative based at CCP in partnership with the Academy for Educational Development, Save the Children, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, and Tulane University 's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In addition to the five core partners, HCP works with leading Southern-based health communication organizations as well as global programming partners from the corporate sector, international media, academic institutions, and faith-based organizations.
For more information about HCP and a full list of HCP partners and collaborators, visit www.hcpartnership.org .
The Information and Knowledge for Optimal Health (INFO) project creates a new paradigm for knowledge sharing, where health professionals, advocates, and concerned policymakers join in a network of information sharing around reproductive health. This five-year USAID-funded global project — which includes CCP, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and Constella Corp. — collects, synthesizes, and disseminates best practices and state-of-the-art information, using a variety of channels and technologies, and builds the information-sharing capability of organizations around the world. For more information, please visit www.infoforhealth.org
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