Mass Communication for Health

In a large country like India with over a billion population and about 1% infected with HIV/ AIDS which is likely to increase to nearly 2-4% in the next decade its pertinent that more effort is put into increasing awareness and thereby bringing about changes in individual behavior. In doing so they would help the health system by bringing the people to use the primary, secondary and tertiary health care facilities already existing in the country.

A couple of years ago a study by the World bank 2004, showed that though we have a huge public health system up and running the people participation was so poor that the money spent was useless. Even among the poor people who could garner resources went to private clinics and the rest to some traditional medical units. With polio not eradicated and malaria and TB showing stronger bacterial strains which dont respond to old medicines, public health communications needs a real big push. It needs a different approach. It no longer can be a piecemeal approach which is important for certain important target related awareness programmes but to bring about a total new behavioural changes among the public, a different and a more sustianed effort is needed.

Apart from the LOWE ads which for HIV and now the Break through campaign and some kind of ads by NDTV on HIV i am yet to see a real campaign like for example the pepsi or coke campaigns or even the HLL approach to soap campaigns.