Partnerships between Primary Care and Health Communication for Research, Teaching, and Policy

Context: Family Medicine clinician researchers and health communication researchers can learn a lot with and from each other. Family medicine researchers are driven by desire to address a clinical problem or healthcare outcome, while health communication researchers often begin with a framework that addresses the process of clinical care, medical education, or advocacy.

Objective: Partnerships between family medicine researchers and health communication researchers can potentially improve healthcare outcomes AND articulate the communication process—the pathways linking communication with healthcare outcomes. This poster maps out resources for connecting family medicine clinician researchers with health communication scholars to build partnerships for shared research, teaching, and policy goals locally, nationally, and globally.

Setting or Dataset: This poster provides an overview and case studies to illustrate strengths of partnerships by unpacking assumptions about interdisciplinary partnerships between health communication researchers and family medicine clinician researchers. We articulate explanatory frameworks of communication processes that are generally central to research in health communication but are embedded in healthcare outcomes and impact in family medicine research.

Results: We illustrate strengths in partnerships by describing three successful health communication partnerships with clinician researchers in primary healthcare. We describe implications for research, teaching, and policy.

Conclusions: Examples illustrate partnership-building strategies employed, and success stories, but also challenges experienced in partnerships. We describe opportunities for partnerships between researchers and clinician researchers, opportunities for academic–community stakeholder partnerships to combat health inequities, opportunities for healthcare organization–community partnerships to improve healthcare access and health outcomes, and inter-professional collaborations within healthcare organizations and across organizations with a health-related mission, including partnerships emphasizing communication skills training.