APHA’s Annual Meeting is often described as the world’s stage for public health, and rightly so. Among the many events, the APHA Public Health Film Festival has become a mainstay on attendees’ meeting calendars. The annual festival showcases public health films of all types and topics and is just one of the many contributions of APHA’s Health Communications Working Group.
Over the past 25 years, HCWG — a working group within APHA’s Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section — has organized robust scientific and invited sessions at APHA’s annual meetings, helped develop the first-ever Healthy People communications objectives and hosted scores of skill-building webinars.
The Section has also gained national acclaim for advancing cutting-edge, evidence-based approaches to improve the public’s health, increase health literacy and build awareness of inequities.
“We are a unique group,” HCWG Chair Fawad Shah, PhD, told The Nation’s Health. “Other professional organizations focus on the public health part, or just on the communications part, but our group prides itself on our mix of academicians, practitioners, students, public health professionals and health communications professionals who all come together to improve health and health inequities in the nation.
“We represent an important public health sector and are extremely proud of our accomplishments over the past 25 years,” Shah said.
HCWG will mark those accomplishments at APHA’s 2023 Annual Meeting and Expo in Atlanta in November. Highlights of the group’s plans include 14 scientific and invited sessions covering communication technology, vaccine misinformation, disparities and equity, communication campaigns and more.
An invited session, to be held on Monday, Nov. 13, will celebrate the working group’s anniversary and reflect on the intersections of public health and health communication practice. Meeting attendees will also once again be treated to film festival sessions, with new works focusing on the root causes of maternal health inequities among black women and sexual health issues experienced by veterans. This year’s offerings will also feature a film on the power of filmmaking and how to get started.
“The APHA Film Festival has come a long way since the days of VHS tapes and mail-in submissions,” Linda Bergonzi-King, MPH, HCWG’s feature session organizer and former Film Festival chair, told The Nation’s Health. “It has grown to be a focal point of the APHA Annual Meeting.”
HCWG’s year-long 25th anniversary activities will officially kick off on Sunday, Nov. 12, at 6 p.m. with a social event, said Jude McDivitt, PhD, one of the group’s founding members.
“We plan to present the history and accomplishments of HCWG in fun ways and engage old and new members in giving us input on future directions for the group,” McDivitt said. “We like to see new faces.”
For more on the group’s APHA 2023 lineup, check out the PHEHP Section’s sessions in the meeting program, online at www.apha.org/annualmeeting.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
