Коммуникация в сфере здоровья: теория и практика (на английском языке)
Факультет государственного управления

This course is the second one involving health communication, exploring the situation with the Covid-19 pandemic. 2020 demonstrated that health communication turned out to be in deep crisis all over the world. Apart from the profound analysis of the current situation, we need to understand why all of us turned out to be here and where to go.The COVID-19 pandemic has already demonstrated that health communication has turned into a top priority of our modern society. It is a sure thing that being multidisciplinary in nature it turned into essential knowledge for everyone in their daily lives. It assists in understanding the decision taking and the nature of health advice and what is more important,it saves lives.

The course covers the basic concepts the health communication that shape our understanding of health and illness, the means and ways of socio-cultural construction of health concepts, provides a history of health-related social movements including the discussion of the life medicalization concept that has shaped modern society. The concept of consumer culture as well as the approaches to health routines are mentioned in respect to understand the norms and values of the society. The course suggest a novel approach of analyzing formal and informal interactions about health that turned out to be very influential.

It should be pointed out that the environment of uncertainty demonstrated the power of online information in decision taking. The course is focused not only on the essential issue of trust between doctors and patients in the XXI century, but also studies the blogging as a contemporary representation of health and illness. Consequently, we explore the roots of distrust in patient-doctor interactions, the role of both parties in the medical decision taking and analyzing the ways people cope with the stress of a long period of uncertainty.