Matthew Kreuter, PhD, MPH, has a single-minded determination to translate scientific discoveries and knowledge into accessible, on-the-ground medical services for the disadvantaged. Director of the Brown School’s Health Communication Research Laboratory (HCRL), Krueter has pioneered ground-breaking approaches to health communications.
What drew you to public health and health communications?
I was an English major as an undergraduate, and what I liked most was writing. I found my way into media relations, but I felt like my efforts could be channeled to greater social good, so I started exploring and found something called social marketing. Social marketing is really applying what we know about effective communication from consumer products and services to social practices and policies. There aren’t really schools of social marketing but there are schools of public health, and that’s how I got to public health.
You’ve made a mission of addressing health inequalities. How would you describe the reality of health disparities today?
There are health disparities, and they are great. If you’re poor and a person of color in this country, the odds are that you’ll have outcomes that will be worse than virtually every other person. These are across the lifespan. People who live in poverty are subject to a great many more life stresses, environmental toxins and risks, fewer opportunities for healthy living.
What is the role of health communications in helping ameliorate these disparities?
There are three broad goals. One is increased reach, one is increased effectiveness, and the third is greater connectedness. You have to work harder to find ways and places to reach populations that aren’t necessarily well connected through mainstream channels of society. If information is going to make a difference, people have to be exposed to it. Where are the places you’re going to reach people? What are the sources of information? Even if you have reach, when you get there and have contact with people, you have to offer something that is understandable, that’s meaningful in the context of their lives.
The HCRL’s Reflections of You project, which puts health information kiosks in laundromats, applies these principles. How did this project develop?
We knew from a previous study that delivering tailored messages increases women’s use of mammography. We needed to find a way to deliver that tailored information not just to study participants but to women throughout the community. We realized we could deliver the program through a kiosk where women could just answer questions by touching the computer screen, and that kiosk could create for them their own tailored magazine, a printout.
Then the question was, where do we put these kiosks to reach women? Six places rose to the top — beauty salons, churches, laundromats, health centers, social service agencies, and libraries. We put kiosks in all those places, we plugged them in and left them for about a month. Laundromats really stood out in both their reach and their specificity. We started about placing kiosks in laundromats about five years ago.
Now we’ve begun to build kiosks with phones attached so that if you’re 40 or older and answer “no” to the question about mammograms, that phone will ring, and instantly while you’re standing at the kiosk you’re talking to a local provider in your community who can provide a free mammogram for you.
You’re on the planning committee for the Brown School’s Master of Public Health degree. Is it unusual for an MPH program to reside in a social work school?
I think it is. I think it’s a terrific cultural fit. The values and priorities of social work and public health are really compatible. Bigger than that, we’re moving into an era where we think beyond one discipline to how lots of disciplines working together can be more effective in solving social problems, and so in that way I think this move is really a sign of what’s to come. Learn more about our MPH Program
You have a secondary appointment at the School of Medicine. To what extent do you work with medical faculty?
A lot. One of our new projects will bring National Public Radio’s StoryCorps to the Siteman Cancer Center to collect stories of how parents with cancer talk to their kids about the diagnosis.
What are your best hopes for the impact of your work?
There are two fundamental challenges. One, how do we get communication strategies that work integrated into real-world systems that serve disadvantaged populations? It is the central focus in the center right now.
Second, within science there is this enormous gap between scientific discoveries and practice. The reason that we can’t get from here to there is not because we don’t want to, and it’s not because we don’t necessarily know how to, it isn’t because we don’t have the will. It’s because between these two points there’s no infrastructure. There’s no system for getting from discovery to application. Someone’s going to have to build infrastructure. I think we could be an important part of that, conceiving how that works.
Read the full interview with Professor Kreuter in the next issue of Social Impact.
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