Business Insight: Firms Form Unlikely Partnership to Beat Smoking
Your companies are credited with a multifaceted social marketing campaign that has helped reduce or prevent tobacco use among teens, adults and pregnant women. Explain your strategy.
Love: Social marketing is a bottom-up strategy that involves target audiences in campaign research, development and implementation. It's no small feat to create campaigns that impact more than 12 different Utah audiences, ranging from high-risk teens to pregnant women.
Global Challenges | Stigma, Fear Hampers HIV Testing, Treatment in Sierra Leone
Although all district hospitals and multiple sites in the capital, Freetown, provide HIV tests at no cost, the "concept of voluntarily discovering one's HIV status is largely alien," and most people are only tested after being referred to do so by their physician, PlusNews reports. "We are trying to encourage more agencies to become involved in social marketing of HIV testing ... [a]nd if we can secure further funding from the World Bank, we would like to see a model of door-to-door mobilization, as accessibility to testing sites is still a major barrier to some districts," [See also]
UW Receives Grant for Suicide Prevention
“We always have done outreach, helping students with depression and preventing suicide,” David Cozzens, director of the UW [University of Wyoming] Counseling Center and interim dean of students, said. “This gives us the opportunity to have a lot more resources around getting students help….”
The model proposed by Lena Edmunds, UW AWARE program director, is a three-in-one, or public heath approach.
With such an approach, the university will work to identify at-risk individuals by providing Gatekeepers training to key individuals, making the program accessible to the student body as a whole and building a campus and community coalition on suicide prevention.
“(We’re also doing) a large social marketing campaign, really trying to help reduce the stigma of seeking mental health resources,” Edmunds said. “It is okay to seek help.”
The grant proposes suicide prevention in the long run, Cozzens said, “but what we are really doing is getting the word out to folks about how to recognize and identify issues that might indicate a person is struggling.”
Call for Europe to Take the Lead in Revitalising Family Planning Agenda in World's Poorest Countries
…Family planning promotion is unique among medical interventions in the breadth of its potential benefits in terms of achieving the MDGs. It reduces poverty, maternal, and child mortality (in 2000, about 90% of global abortion-related and 20% of obstetric-related mortality an morbidity could have been averted by the use of effective contraception – amounting to 150,000 deaths avoided). It contributes to achieving universal primary schooling, empowers women by reducing the burden of excessive childbearing, and enhances environmental sustainability by stabilising the population of the planet…
Professor Cleland comments: ‘A convincing case can be made that investment in family planning should have a higher priority than investment in HIV prevention and treatment. Yet, current priorities are the reverse. For instance, in Ghana, HIV/AIDS is sucking funds, staff, and political energy from family planning, and this is a country where women are more likely to die of unsafe abortion than of AIDS . . . In Uganda, with a moderately severe longstanding HIV epidemic, population size is nevertheless projected to grow from 30 million today to 61 million by 2025, and further to 127 million by the middle of this century, posing huge difficulties for economic advance…
The keys to effective and sustainable family planning programmes are well established, say the authors. These include high-level political commitment, which is what is lacking at the moment, a broad coalition of support from elite groups, adequate funding, the legitimisation of the idea of smaller families and modern contraceptives through mass media, and the availability of a range of methods which can be accessed via medical facilities, outreach services and social marketing initiatives.
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