Dear colleagues,
This call for papers might be of interest to you or perhaps your colleagues in the health disciplines.
Best regards,
Doreen
Call for Papers: Special Issue
Professional Communication in the Health Fields: Localizing for Diversity
Now, it is widely recognized that medicine and health care are not universal but intimately connected to local cultures and medical traditions. Consequently, health and medical services are best delivered using the cultural and communication patterns of the patients, a process called localization. This move to localization has caused health care providers, researchers, governments, and professional communicators to rethink what it means to provide effective healthcare for patients who have different healthcare traditions, communication assumptions, languages, and types and levels of literacy.
Healthcare is also the area where professional communicators can perhaps impact users the most. Quite simply, if professional communicators do not localize medical information such as fact sheets for prescriptions, instructions for home medical devices, consent forms for treatment, or even directional signs and wayfinding materials for hospitals and clinics, patients can die.
Because of these high stakes, many countries such as the United States, Israel, Australia, and Canada and governing bodies such as the European Union have legislation that dictates not only what medical information must be localized, but also the cultural and linguistic standards for assessing the localization efforts (minorityhealth.hhs.gov). These mandates have put professional communicators worldwide at the forefront of the campaign to make healthcare information accessible to all patients. Also, recent advances in information and communication technologies further complicate–but also might help address–some of the health communication needs of diverse populations.
This special issue of the Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization seeks to address this great need to develop culturally and linguistically appropriate healthcare communications for global contexts. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of perspectives including business, science, humanitarian practice, health, social advocacy, education, and government. Practitioners as well as academics are encouraged to submit their work for consideration.
We welcome the submission of scholarly articles addressing the following topics in the area of healthcare and professional communication, including, but not limited to:
· Localizing healthcare information for specific cultures, regions, communities, or local audiences;
· Navigating a specific population’s attitudes toward healthcare and health communications;
· Working with national and international legislation that dictates what healthcare information should be localized and how;
· Training healthcare staff to have effective communication skills with diverse populations;
· Language or graphical considerations for localizing healthcare materials;
· Training diverse communities and leaders to advocate for and obtain better delivery of health care;
· Promoting healthcare or preventative care among differing populations;
· Assessing and improving health literacy, especially for vulnerable and diverse populations;
· Teaching health literacy in a variety of formal and informal contexts;
· Connecting advances in information and communication technologies to healthcare communication needs of diverse populations.
Proposals (up to 500 words) for research papers, short best practices pieces*, and tutorials are due by October 10th, 2011. Full manuscripts will be due March, 2012, and the Special Edition will be published in September, 2012. Review criteria can be found on the Journal’s website at www.rpcg.org. Proposals should be sent as an email attachment to one of the Special Edition editors:
Nicole St. Germaine-McDaniel, Angelo State University: [log in to unmask]
Barry Thatcher, New Mexico State University: [log in to unmask]
Authors may use the following optional framework for best practices pieces: title, description, methods used, results, technologies used, and lessons learned. While the proposal and review process is the same for research papers, tutorials, and best practices pieces, final manuscripts for best practices should be shorter: approximately 1000 to 3000 words in length.
About the Journal
The Journal of Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization publishes articles on the theory, practice, and teaching of technical and professional communication in critical global and intercultural contexts such as business, manufacturing, environment, information technology, and others. As a global initiative, the Journal welcomes manuscripts with diverse approaches and contexts of research, but manuscripts are to be submitted in English and grounded in relevant theory and appropriate research methods. The Journal is peer reviewed with an editorial board consisting of experienced researchers and practitioners from over 20 countries.
The Journal is free or “open access,” using PKP open source software and housed at East Carolina University. RCPG is published on a quarterly basis, with its first edition premiering in December of 2010. For more information, see www.rpcg.org.
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