FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 5, 2004

Health Communication Partnership Updates P-Process for Designing Health Communication Strategies

BALTIMORE — The Health Communication Partnership (HCP) has updated and revised the P-Process, a tool that guides health communication professionals as they develop strategic communication programs. HCP is a team of five leading institutions led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs (CCP) and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The P-Process leads communication professionals step by step from a loosely defined concept about changing a certain health behavior to a strategic program with a measurable impact among the target audience. It is used to develop communication programs addressing a wide range of health topics such as encouraging safer sexual behavior to prevent HIV transmission, promoting childhood immunization efforts, or advocating for policy changes that will improve health care delivery.

HCP addresses family planning, maternal health, child survival, HIV/AIDS, and other infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Used successfully around the world to design health communication programs since 1982, the original P-Process was revised to better reflect the goals of HCP as well as overall evolution in the field in the past decade. Major changes include the addition of Participation and Capacity Strengthening. These two concepts appear throughout the revised P-Process because they are considered essential to building strong partnerships and coalitions from the international/national level down to the local/community level.

The new P-Process also expands the first step of "analysis" by dividing it into a situation analysis and a communication/audience analysis. Another change occurs in the actual design of the "P." The original P-Process completed the circle of the "P" by bringing Step Five — impact evaluation — back to the design stage. The revised version allows communication professionals to use impact evaluation results to return to either the design or analysis stage.

Step Four, Implementation and Monitoring, has been maximized in the design to indicate the relative significance of this step in any program. And while the original P-Process linked management to implementation and monitoring in Step Four, the revised version no longer includes management in the fourth step because it is central to and inferred in all steps of the communication programming process.

HCP is a global communication initiative led by Johns Hopkins' CCP in partnership with the Academy for Educational Development, Save the Children, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, and Tulane University's School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In addition to the five core partners, HCP works with leading Southern-based health communication organizations as well as global programming partners from the corporate sector, international media, academic institutions, and faith-based organizations.

With representatives in more than 30 countries, Johns Hopkins' CCP is a pioneer in the field of strategic, research-based communication programs for behavior change and health promotion that have helped transform the theory and practice of public health communication. Visit the CCP website for more information.

For further information contact: Kim Martin at Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, 111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, USA. Tel: 410 659-6140; Fax: 410 659-6266 e-mail: press@jhuccp.org.