The Health Buck Stops Where? Thematic Framing of Health Discourse to Understand the Context for CVD Prevention

Abstract

Using a constructed week methodology, we analyzed media summaries for the type of health discourse (health care delivery, disease-specific prevention, lifestyle risk factors, public/environmental health disease, social determinants of health) portrayed over a 5-year period as a means of describing the context within which health staff worked to prevent heart disease in one Canadian province. The results reveal that heart disease received very little media coverage, despite provincial health data revealing it to be the leading cause of mortality, morbidity, and health care costs. Coverage of the health care system dominated the media landscape over the 5-year period. The study findings also suggest that the health discourses in the media summaries were represented as primarily thematic, rather than as episodic narratives, relieving any one level of government as entirely responsible for the health of its constituents. Media advocacy strategies may be a means to redress the imbalance of health discourses presented by the media.

Notes

¹Despite the ongoing search for conceptual consensus on the defining characteristics of capacity, it is generally thought to capture the presence of infrastructure/resources, relevant policy, champions/leadership, sustainability of programs, and problem-solving abilities at the community/organizational level (Joffres, Heath, Farquharson, Barkhouse, Latter, & MacLean, 2004).

²In British Columbia, health authorities are geographically defined, public sector institutions responsible for acute care, long-term care, hospitals, public health, and health promotion/disease prevention and rehabilitation facilities and services.

³Media summaries from 98 print, 8 television, 5 radio, and 2 wire sources representing national, provincial, regional, and ethnic media reports were reviewed and scanned weekly for health and health-related stories.