Exclusive for the Daily Outlook Afghanistan
Afghan Televisions' Role in Health Improvement
Freedom of expression and development of the media have been one of the biggest achievements of Afghanistan in the past decade. At the same time, Afghanistan ranks one of the worst countries in the world in terms of the health of the population. In his masters' thesis, Maisam Najafizada has looked into the way Afghan televisions have been dealing with health issues. In his attempt to respond to three main research questions, Maisam has identified a number of significant points in the realm of Afghan health, the media and the relationship between the two.
The research and its findings
Researchers have found that the media, in particular television, has so far been a major source of health information for public, with the potential to influence audience's thinking, attitude, behaviour, and decision-making process regarding health issues.
This research aims to understand how the media of a war-torn state like Afghanistan deals with health issues of the country – a country that started to build its basic infrastructures including health and media from scratch in 2002 with the support of the international community. This research looked into three months broadcast of Dabestan Bo Ali and Darmelana television shows to respond the following three research questions:
1.What health related stories do Afghan national private televisions broadcast?
2.How do the Afghan private national televisions frame health stories?
3.What health-related socio-cultural practices are televised through Afghan national, private televisions?
The study finds that Afghan television media broadcasted health stories on food and environment safety (25%), maternal and infant health (21%), oral and dental health (18%), child health (11%), mental health (7%), communicable disease (4%), and other health issues (14%). The study revealed that the media equally held responsible individual and societal factors for health problems, while individual behaviour change was frequently mentioned as the solution rather than societal change.
Talking about women's issue and critiquing traditional/religious healing were taboos just a decade ago, although the media has managed to inform the audience on and implicitly disapprove of harmful cultural norms i.e. health-seeking behaviour and gender-related norms. Interesting finding was that female presenter or guest in the health show increased female participation over the phone in Darmalena. But the way the media dealt with socio-cultural practices were very primitive and there was no indication of any evident public health strategy in the health shows.
Points of discussions
Public health and its priorities. Although the media carried one story on health infrastructure in which the Health Minister spoke about health policy, there was no mention of health policy, health infrastructure, public health performance, and quality or quantity of public health services. Major public health concerns in Afghanistan, according to the Ministry of Public Health, are maternal and infant care, child care, communicable disease, and mental health. Instead of the major concerns, food and environment safety topped the frequency of coverage with oral and dental care in the third place. On the contrary, communicable diseases, which are easily preventable by little health information, received the poorest coverage; that too not about any major communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, or sexually transmitted disease. In addition, mental health that affects the war-ravaged people was the second lowest in the media health agenda.
Interestingly, there was no mention of statistics or epidemic of disease over the entire six week of coverage in any television media, except one health news on a conference regarding gynaecology and obstetrics in which the health minister spoke of huge maternal death. This means the media has not been successful in giving awareness to the public regarding widespread diseases that affect the population the most. For instance, child health is the second important priority in the country, and the most critical disease that kill children under five are acute respiratory disease, pneumonia, diarrhoea, dysentery, malaria, and lack of vaccination. They are all easily preventable with a little knowledge about child care. Comparatively, the media had one story over the six weeks on newborn care and another on child's sleeplessness.
Media and public health relations. This lack of awareness of major public health issues was indicative of the poor relation between the media and public health professionals. The poor relation was the result of weakness from both sides: the media and the public health professionals. Both fields were dominated by medical professionals. In the media, the medical doctors lacked journalism skills.
In the public health industry, they lacked public health knowledge. Government journalism schools are remnants of communist-regimes to whom journalism meant a vehicle of communism ideology propaganda, and in regards to public health, there has not been a single public health school in the country since before the development of Kabul University's Public Health Administration program. All public health professionals have been trained as medical doctors who then followed a career in public health.
Physician dominance in public health. The dominance of the health communication field by medical doctors not only influenced the topics covered in the media but also the way they were covered. The result of the frame studies of the media content indicated that very little information was provided regarding societal-level (public health) solutions to health problems. The frame studies indicated that the media blamed individuals' behaviour and societal factors equally for the health problems, but in regards to the solutions to health problems, individuals' behaviour change was the media's favourite rather than societal-level change. For what medical doctors care is disease and individual's health; and to prevent disease and promote health of the population at large is the duty of public health professionals.
The research suggests that a number of factors that can help provision of better health information in the media are better training for journalists in the field of health, increasing female participation in the health media, taking advantage of modern communication technology such as mobile phone and internet, and better coordination between public health professionals and the media. The research also suggests a dire need for public health schools in the country.