Pharmacy Daily | Getting messaging right on COVID-19

PHARMACISTS need to embrace behavioural medicine to get key health messages across to patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts believe.

Speaking during an International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) webinar last week, University of Auckland pharmacist and behavioural scientist, Dr Amy Chen, said the profession had a key role to play in combating misinformation about COVID-19.

"What happens during a healthcare crisis is there's a high risk of misinformation, and we know that misinformation has the potential to be as dangerous as a direct health consequence of COVID-19 ," she said.

Chen noted the World Health Organization (WHO) Director General, Tedros Adhanom, has described the social spread of scientifically inaccurate information around COVID-19 as an "infodemic".

To tackle the spread of misinformation, she urged pharmacists to consider how they express the risk posed by the pandemic, while stressing the need to build trust and consider how the public perceives that threat posed by COVID-19.

Chen's University of Auckland colleague, clinical psychologist, Dr Liesje Donkin, told the webinar that advice from pharmacists "comes with a different layer of credibility", but she stressed that health professionals need to listen to the concerns of patients, and support them to understand the risks and causes of the virus, rather than arguing with them

"Understanding where your patient comes from in terms of their attitudes is really important for improving outcomes," she said.

"There's quite a body of people here [in New Zealand] reporting that COVID-19 is caused by the roll out of the 5G network - now if they believe it's caused by 5G they're unlikely to engage in handwashing and use personal protective equipment.

"People come to us with a very fixed set of beliefs that have come from their interactions with loved ones, what they've read in the media and through their interactions with health professionals.

"Unless we understand what their concerns are and what their perceptions of the illness are, we may miss what they think is important and they will switch off and not hear what we're saying."