Aiming precisly, hitting the target and improving the living conditions of the people we serve: - the art of health communication

The constantly increasing production of scientific knowledge about healt has resultet in an abundancy of scientific information available to the public. But the fact that the information is available does not nessecarily mean, that it reaches the individuals who could benefit from them. The problem is that there is a very long and unpaved road from the international peer reviewed journals to the everyday life of ordinary citizens. So long, that much scientific information never reaches the audience it was intended for. One of the problems in this matter is that we know relatively little about health information seeking behaviour among laypeople. What sources do they use and trust? What types of information do they internalize and what do they reject? In the first part of our presentation, we will present the litterature on the health seeking behaviour of young adults and add to it the data obtained from a series of focus group interviews carried out with young adults in Tromsö on their health information seeking behaviour. We find it safe to assume, that only a relatively small part of the population outside the narrow academic circles of health science, has the nessecary health litteracy skills to digest international scientific journal articles. So to be able to reach the public, the scientific knowledge needs to be translated to the ‘language’ and format of their preferred platforms. However, translation often means loss of precision, which is painfull for many scientists. It may also mean loss of controll over the message, since the translation process often involves professional communicators like journalists and information officers. On top of that such activities are not incentivized under the current academic managerial paradigm, where only international scientific journal articles counts for promotion and tenure. For these reasons, many scientists shy away from presenting their results on non-scientific media platforms raeching out to the general public. In the second part of our presentation, we will present data from a series of interviews carried out with communication prize winning scientists at UiT, who despite the lack of incentives take pride in communicating their research to the public. What do they do? How do they do it? And Why do they do it? We will end our presentation by comparing the two different studies seeking similarities and differences in the patterns identified in the data from the two studies. So the question we seek to answer is: To what extend do do the needs of young adults in the Arctic region concerning health related scientific information match what the health scientists actually do, when communicating their results to the public?