Abstract
BackgroundClaims about what we need to do to improve our health are everywhere. Most interventions simply tell people what to do, and do not empower them to critically assess health information. Our objective was to design mass media resources to enable the public to critically appraise the trustworthiness of claims about the benefits and harms of treatments and make informed health choices.MethodsResearch was conducted between 2013 and 2016 across multiple iterative phases. Participants included researchers, journalists, parents, other members of the public. First, we developed a list of 32 key concepts that people need to understand to be able to assess the trustworthiness of claims about treatment effects. Next, we used a human-centred design approach, to generate ideas for resources for teaching the key concepts, and developed and user-tested prototypes through qualitative interviews. We addressed identified problems and repeated this process until we had a product that was deemed relevant and desirable by our target audience, and feasible to implement.ResultsWe generated over 160 ideas, mostly radio-based. After prototyping some of these, we found that a podcast produced collaboratively by health researchers and journalists was the most promising approach. We developed eight episodes of the Informed Health Choices podcast, a song on critical thinking about treatments and a reminder checklist. Early versions of the podcast were reportedly too long, boring and confusing. We shortened the episodes, included one key concept per episode, and changed to story-telling with skits. The final version of the podcast was found to be useful, understandable, credible and desirable.ConclusionWe found many problems with various prototypes of mass media resources. Using a human-centred design approach, we overcame those problems. We have developed a guide to help others prepare similar podcasts.
Highlights
Claims about what we need to do to improve our health are everywhere
In the first phase of this work, we developed a list of 32 key concepts that people need to understand in order to be able to assess treatment claims and make informed decisions [30]
Parents who participated in the user testing were mainly female (20 out of 28), had a median age of 28 years, had an education level of primary or less (19 out of 28) and were employed in the informal sector running small home-based businesses (25 out of 28)
Summary
Claims about what we need to do to improve our health are everywhere. Most interventions tell people what to do, and do not empower them to critically assess health information. Our objective was to design mass media resources to enable the public to critically appraise the trustworthiness of claims about the benefits and harms of treatments and make informed health choices. While some claims are trustworthy, many are not, and the trustworthiness of claims found in the mass media frequently is not adequately assessed [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11] This can affect health behaviours and healthcare use [12,13,14]. Untrustworthy treatment claims and misinformed decisions about treatments result in wasted resources and unnecessary suffering [15,16,17,18,19]. This is a universal problem, but the consequences are likely to be greater in settings where resources are scarce [20,21,22,23,24]
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