Media Training & Public Awareness

What We Do › HIV/AIDS › Media Training & Public Awareness

Partnerships are the hallmark of many of AIHA’s programs and we have long recognized the value of linking healthcare practitioners, public health advocates, and health policymakers with members of the mass media who can help transfer potentially life-saving information to a broad audience. By forming a partnership with the media, healthcare providers can effectively spread messages about prevention and available services to people in their community. For reporters, this alliance helps ensure better access to timely and accurate information. And, by working together, medical and media professionals can effectively raise public awareness and help put HIV/AIDS on the national agenda.

For example, AIHA’s HIV/AIDS Twinning Center worked with the Zambia Institute of Mass Communication Educational Trust (ZAMCOM) to enhance the reporting skills of print and broadcast journalists and editors in 2005-2006. Through this unique media training initiative, journalists attended classroom sessions facilitated by experienced healthcare reporters and presentations on HIV/AIDS given by scientists, clinicians, policymakers, advocates, and people living with or affected by the virus. After these sessions, participants had the opportunity to put what they have learned to use during extensive fieldwork in high-burden communities.

The Twinning Center has continued its collaboration with ZAMCOM, launching in 2008 a partnership linking the organization with the University of Kentucky School of Journalism to help build institutional and media training capacity. In addition, the Twinning Center supports a second partnership that links ZAMCOM with the Media Institute of Southern Africa in Botswana. Together, all three partners are working to improve the quality and scope of HIV/AIDS reporting in Africa and have also launched "Hearts and Minds," a multi-country campaign to raise public awareness and reduce stigma and discrimination.

In other countries, particularly Russia and Ukraine, AIHA issues press releases and backgrounders about partnership activities and other programs related to HIV/AIDS, such as the more than 40 clinical training courses offered by the Regional Knowledge Hub for the Care and Treatment of HIV/AIDS in Eurasia. Press conferences associated with key seminars, workshops, facility tours, or other special events also provide a forum for educating and informing the public via the mass media.

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