Health Communication and Caregiving Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

In the inaugural issue of Health Communication, Jon Nussbaum (Health Communication 1:35–40, 1989) commented that evidence strongly suggests, “health communication as a legitimate field of inquiry has finally arrived.” In the same issue, Gary Kreps (Health Communication 1:11–15, 1989) asked, “What difference can the field of health communication make to the public?” (p. 35). Since then, health communication scholars have been contributing to the answer from a variety of perspectives. Leading health communication scholar and editor of Health Communication, Teri Thompson states that health communication deals with health care related environments that give meaning to health status by assuming and defining its cause (Thompson, Explaining illness: Research, theory, and strategies 3–40, 2000). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2000), in achieving the Healthy People 2010/2020 initiatives to educate the public on the nation’s major health priorities, put forth this definition of health communication:KeywordsHealth CommunicationHealth InformationHealth LiteracyHealth Belief ModelHealth Care CommunicatorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.