Health Promotion and Health Education Journals’ Forum

[Pius.Attandoh]

The IUHPE global conference in Geneva in 2010 provides an opportunity for health promotion and health education journals to undertake special activities to strengthen research and knowledge transfer. Various journals might consider thematic issues, and if the journals collaborate in planning the contents of issues leading up to the conference, a great deal of synergy might be realised.
At the conference itself, editors might engage in a range of activities that would add substantial value for conferees. Publishing workshops could be offered at various levels of intensity, and collaboration amongst the editors would spread the workload. An event where conferees could mingle with the editors could provide opportunities for us to hear what readers and authors think about rapidly changing publishing practices, and also provide advice to those needing help to publish their work.
A meeting of the editors at the conference to start a dialogue on issues of mutual interest/concern could be quite useful. Amongst the hot issues that we could take up at the conference (at an editors' meeting, but also in contributed sessions), and in our journal pages, are these:
> how is open access changing the way people publish, search for, and select literature, and are the trends what we hope for;
> how can web 2.0 capabilities enhance knowledge exchange while still keeping quality high;
> how can journals take the lead (or at least better contribute to) in advancing the ethics discourse;
> how can the entire knowledge transfer establishment create better equity in access to information;
> how can language barriers be better addressed with information technology.
This Dialogue on Views of Health Promotion On-line is dedicated to these and similar issues. It is hoped that all editors who serve on the Geneva 2010 scientific committee will participate, but the dialogue is open to all who wish to participate.

[Maurice Mittelmark]

Welcome, fellow editors and Geneva global conference 2010 scientific committee members! This discussion is being technically managed by my colleague in Bergen, Mr. Pius Attandoh. However, it is up to us to manage the content, and use the discussion for whatever information exchanges we think are useful. In the opening post, I have tried to summarise some of the issues that we might address; I look forward to your posts!

[Pius.Attandoh]

I seriously consider the upcoming forum an exciting opportunity especially for young scholars/practitioners (such as ISECN membership) seeking publication of their works. I believe editors of the various journals will highlight clearly the critical issues and indicators that qualify scholarly works for quick publication. It will be interesting to hear the experts speak on those 'hot issues' scheduled for the editors' meeting.
Starting off the discussion from here, I believe, will pay off.Let's get going then!

[Diane Levin-Zamir]

Firstly - I would like to congratulate the initiators of this forum. I think that it is a fantastic way to develop dialogue and communication among us. Maurice - if you haven't already done so, perhaps the editorial advisory board of Global Health Promotion could also be included in the dialogue. Many of them I know might also be on the Global Scientific Committee of the Geneva conference, but perhaps not all.
I'd just like to add to the list of topics mentioned by Maurice, that it might be useful - and appropriate - to look at the social determinants of publishing, how to identify gaps and stratgies for reducing the gaps. Has this already been done ?
Look forward to hearing from you all - Best, Diane

[Maurice Mittelmark]

Of course you are right, Diane, actually I hope all the editors will let their editorial board members know about this discussion, and encourage them to participate.

[cliveneedle]

I add my thanks to Maurice and others involved for generating this important and potentially vital initiative. As suggested, I want to flag up here an initiative that is in preparation which I feel is relevant and I hope will be helpful to the health promotion community. In turn, I hope you may be helpful in adding your knowledge to how we can best set up and take forward the communications tools.
A publicly funded artnership is being developed to support international work on social determinants of health equity, particularly to take forward recommendations from the CSDH (Marmot et al) report. As part of that, the Brussels based organisation with which I work, EuroHealthNet (http://www.eurohealthnet.eu) , was asked what it might do in the EU policy context in which we specialise. To cut a long and complex story short, we are nearly ready to launch a project based initiative called "electronic artery".
Its premise is that faster, more visible targeted action is needed than hitherto to bring about policy and practical changes, and modern electronic communications tools can be used alongside established methods to effect that.
It is intended to be a channel to help ideas, knowledge and action flow to the organs that can move things: policy makers, practitioners and public.
We have three key tasks: to network (without setting up unnecessary new structures) new partnerships of stakeholders in and beyond heath systems, including private, public and non governmental organisations and individuals, and to engage them in thinking about, acting for and implementing SDH approaches; to help to influence policy changes in all relevant competences at EU levels and share learning globally; and to help develop innovative communications approaches to support expert knowledge in the field.
So that's easy then....
This is work in development, and it will gather pace after the London Conference 5-7 November when much of the core outcomes of the CSDH report will be crystallised, and we appoint the colleagues who will do the daily work. So I hesitate to provide much more detail until then , not because it is secret but because over 20 other partners including IUHPE and WHO are very closely involved and decisions will be taken collaboratively.
But one issue is already emerging: the new Web2 approaches (blogs, wikis, deliberative networking tools etc) that we plan to use are inherently more open and empowering than traditional competitive or directional models in public, academic and private sectors. Already some partners have genuine concerns about "being coordinated" when the absolute aim is to facilitate, support and empower a range of actors - to help fire the bullets rather than make them, to use inappropriately warlike terms.
So if some moderation and quality assurance is necessary, how do we move quickly together in real partnership?
I see this vhpo initiative, and other approaches emerging from WHO and elsewhere, as being complementary and a learning opportunity. To succeed, we will need to translate the knowledge and arguments from the journals and institutes into cases that will hold water in the ministerial corridors, parliamentary chambers, boardrooms - and households - of Europe in our specific case, but also across the world.
Lots more practical and philosophical questions can follow if you are interested, but I set this out and post my first query above in the context of current economic crisis within constant environmental challenge: where (apart from some excellent but largely unreported speeches) are the clear voices for health equity to be heard in the frenetic political debate, yet it is fundamental to what we seek to influence?

[Maurice Mittelmark]

The issue of Web2, and how to adapt to it and use it to full advantage, has at least two aspects. The one has to do with how we in health promotion interact with one another; the other has to do with how we use W2 to improve the effectiveness of our advocacy.

Regarding how we work together: Top-down management actually works quite well when the actors are ethical and competent, and the system 'percolates', that is, when people with feet and hearts on the ground move up the system over time, carrying with them new ideas and evolving ideals.

However percolation is a very slow process, and over time the people who started with feet and heart on the ground tend to develop feet and hearts in the clouds, as they percolate to leadership. Now, with Web2, things can change very fast and ideas can percolate tremendously faster than individuals can.

Witness what is happening to the McCain campaign, being highjacked from the handlers, by the Web2 mob!

It seems we need two ways for things to percolate. We need the slow percolation of people (and their slowing evolving ideas) from bottom to top, and we need speed of light percolation of ideas, without regard to top/bottom thinking.

That is what we are trying to accomplish at the IUHPE in the communications arena. We have traditional ways of communicating knowledge via the journals, whether in print or E from, in which Dons decide what is worth disseminating, and how. At the same time we have VHPO, intended to force the Dons to learn from the Web2 mob.

I think the best outcome would a state of constant tension between slow- and rapid-percolation sub-systems. The fundamental premise is that they ARE sub-systems, the one not being able to ignore or escape the influence of the other. That is why my proposal to the IUHPE Board for VHPO included the requirement that the Board would receive and debate reports generated from VHPO Dialogues.

Of course we just started, and this may not work at all.

Regarding how we can improve advocacy: We must learn from other knowledge/advocacy/policy systems, that are much more effective than we are. We think that the delivery of knowledge IS advocacy, and we are baffled that policy makers don't respond. In environmental protection, however, there is a mediator between knowledge producers and policy makers, called the environmental protection MOVEMENT. That is what we do not have, a health promotion MOVEMENT. Instead, our model places responsibility for knowledge development and MOVEMENT in the same hands -- ours. The problem is, we are (somewhat) competent in knowledge development, but we are unsuited to do MOVEMENT work. That is why we need people like Clive and organisations like his, in much greater numbers than they are found today. But: just like the environmental protection arena, we also need the people, we need a MOVEMENT, but we don't have one at all.

There does exist a MOVEMENT we could try to link to, the [url]Peoples' Health Movement (PHM), but they scare us. They act fast. Almost immediately after the Bangkok Charter was announced, they held a press conference condemning the whole exercise.

Back to percolation. The IUHPE is a slow percolator, and should be. The PHM is a fast percolator and it should be. It we could agree to link the two, we would be in a constant state of tension, one too slow for the other, and the other too fast for the one. But we might get some of the mediation we now miss (of course, I don't use the term 'mediation' as it is used in the Ottawa Charter... I don't think).

When I was IUHPE President, I planned to reach out to the PHM, but I never got around to it. Maybe we should invite them to collaborate on Geneva 2010?

PHM is at http://www.phmovement.org/about/index.html

[j.hope.corbin]

Hello,

Just a quick reaction to Clive's And Maurice's posts-- What I think is brilliant about the VHPO model is that anyone (who is behaving reasonably) can bring topics, perspectives and issues to the conversation stream-- thus allowing it to be very bottom-up in terms of content but then the streams will be "summarized" by the stream managers and presented in Global Health Promotion as a more traditional publication. I think it is a very interesting melding of these two modes of communication-- sufficiently open and yet simultaneously reflective-- achieving that "coordination" Clive mentions.

I think the challenge will be getting people in the habit of participating. I think good questions to ask ourselves will be how can we advertise, promote and incentive-ize participation?

[Cat Jones]

I wholeheartedly agree. VHPO is a mechanism to support input from the ground, and as it will be redistributed to a wider audience through Global Health Promotion, we have managed to ensure a practical link between these two models. However, the challenge is stimulating participation. However, beyond the issue of using publications to relay information and innovation from the field by collecting it from new technology and Web 2.0 tools, this issue at hand for the IUHPE's world conference is to make explicit the integral link between the conference as a knowledge exchange and knowledge producing event and the journals as a set of contributors AND disseminators. If we were to tally the global readership of the eight journals who have editors serving on the Geneva conference's Global Scientific Committee we would certainly have a critical mass of professional, within and beyond health promotion. What is at stake for me in this stream of dialogue is how can we tap into the resources, energy and networks of the editorial boards and readership of these journal to concretely contribute to the reflection process leading up to the conference, and to the dissemination of the learning from the conference. These journal are powerful agents and legitimate sources of research, policy and practice in their respected domains. If we want to achieve true intersectoral collaboration in the pursuit of our goals, we cannot only do that on a stage behind a podium or on a committee but for the dialogue to continue we must communicate it via all the possible channels at our disposal AND in the appropriate language and meaningful jargon of those diverse constituencies. The web 2 tools are fundamental for securing a wider, deeper participation base, but we cannot ignore the traditional methods of disseminating knowledge and information.

In the same vein that Global Health Promotion is commited to using the printed word to transfer the synthesis of what arises from VHPO dialogue on a specific question or issue, I would be interested to hear from the other journal editors as to how they might envision using their own journals as conduits for wider dissemination and hence stimulating the dialogue beyond the IUHPE boundaries. I know that many have already expressed interest in collaboration, and I would like to suggest that a first step in this direction might be the publication of some joint / co-editorials amongst some of the editors to be published in a selection of the journals on board in this endeavour.

[Pius.Attandoh]

Considering that VHPO appears to be receiving the endorsement of most contributors in this forum, I think we need to start addressing the issue of stimulating participation of a cross section of members and non-members. And if we are to succeed in that regard,then I believe we need to open up dialogue on many more interesting thematic areas. The exciting thing about VHPO, I believe, is the innovation it introduces to the traditional models of communication.