End-of-life communication practices in Hong Kong
Principal Investigator: Dr Margo Turnbull
About the research: Communication is an important part of the work people do in all care services. This research project is exploring how training, mentoring and education can be improved to support the communication skills of end-of-life care workers. The research is aimed at all people working in end-of-life care services in Hong Kong (including social workers, volunteers, clinicians). This research is funded by a grant from the University Grants Council of Hong Kong.
Enquiries:
Dr Margo Turnbull, Email: margo.turnbull@polyu.edu.hk
Dr Carol Yu, Email: wm-carol.yu@polyu.edu.hk
Using cues and heuristics to test responses of older Hong Kong residents to digital health promotion messages
The use of digital health messaging has grown exponentially as a result of restrictions associated with the Covid-19 health crisis. Limitations on access to older and at-risk populations as part of Covid-19 risk management has increased the widespread implementation of digital technologies associated with health promotion and health literacy for this group of people. This research project will look at key dimensions of health messaging that influence understanding and compliance with advice including the use of organisational branding to build trust, visual representation of an authority figure involved in message delivery, personal relevance to the target audience and conversational style of information presentation.
Research team: Margo Turnbull (PI); Co-Is: Bernadette Watson, Dr Simon Chow (CUHK), Dr Alice Yau (HKU)
Leveraging ‘uncertainty’ during a health crisis: A comparative analysis of the speeches of four international political leaders during the first 6 months of 2020
Speeches given by political leaders during a time of crisis are important tools in the management of uncertainty and public anxiety. The Covid-19 health crisis has been shaped by constant uncertainty in relation to the novel coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) itself, infection routes and mortality rates. This project will analyse speeches made by leaders in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the United Kingdom during the first six months of the health crisis. In this context, political speeches are viewed as texts constructed by a variety of contributors (e.g. the speaker, experts, speech writers) rather than examples of spontaneous or naturalistic speech. The findings of this research will contribute new knowledge to the fields of political and health communication by exploring and evaluating how uncertainty was used to encourage compliance with politically-driven health and infection control directives.
Research team: Dr Margo Turnbull (PI); Co-Is: Prof. Bernadette Watson, Dr Blair Ying Jin
Click here for more information of this project or contact Dr Margo Turnbull.
Community disruption, collective trauma and recovery
The notion of collective trauma refers to the community-level effects of events that cause widespread social disruption over an extended period of time. Protest movements and population health crisis are examples of such potentially traumatic events. Previous research has focused on collective trauma in the context of natural disasters such as bushfires, floods, or civil war. The collective trauma associated with prolonged social unrest such as that seen in Hong Kong in recent months, and the disruption and uncertainty caused by the current global health crisis, have not yet been studied in detail or in close temporal proximity to key events. The experiences of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University – a community of more than 30, 000 students and staff – over the last six months offer a novel opportunity to study collective trauma and recovery within a culturally and linguistically diverse university community. We initiated a multi-method research study (human research ethics reference: HSEARS20191122001) in the weeks immediately following the protest related events at PolyU in November 2019. Research activities were undertaken in either English, Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese depending on individual preferences. Early analysis has highlighted a number of important themes which warrant further investigation in relation to community-level recovery following large-scale disruption such as social unrest and population health emergencies.
Research Team (in alphabetical order):
- Alexandra Sanderson
- Amos Yung
- Beatrice Lok
- Bernadette Watson (PI) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernadette_Watson2/projects
- Margo Turnbull https://www.researchgate.net/project/Community-disruption-collective-trauma-and-recovery
- Ying Jin https://www.researchgate.net/project/Community-disruption-collective-trauma-and-recovery-2
For inquiries about this research, please contact Margo at margo.turnbull@polyu.edu.hk or Blair at 15902575r@connect.polyu.hk
Lung cancer stigma
Lung cancer is the fifth most commonly diagnosed cancer globally and contributes 1 in 5 cancer deaths. In particular, the increase of lung cancer in women has seen it overtake breast cancer as the most significant threat to life, yet the advocacy and support for lung cancer has yet to catch up. Adding to this picture, lung cancer patients, more so than other cancer patients, feel stigmatised by their disease, and this increases psychological distress. Evidence for lung cancer stigma has been reported in patients in the UK, North America, and Australia. However, this phenomenon has not been examined in Asia until now. Although in Western Educated Industralised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) cultures smoking has declined since the late twentieth century, elsewhere declines have been less steep or rates have even increased. Asian cultures have seen slow declines or even increases, especially in women.
This research entitled Cultural Communication Perspectives on moralization as a predictor of lung cancer stigma represents a collaboration between FH and FHSS at PolyU with Griffith University in Australia. Our project is based on a model of stigma developed by Occhipinti and colleagues that focuses on people’s perceptions of smoking. In many cultures, smoking is seen as a violation of morality and we believe that these perceptions may drive lung cancer stigma. Our project is gathering evidence for this effect in Hong Kong SAR and Australia using both quantitative methods from psychology and methods such as discourse analysis from communication research. The investigators from Griffith University are Associate Professor Stefano Occhipinti, and Professor Liz Jones. From PolyU they are Associate Professor Andy Cheng (check spelling) from Rehabilitation Sciences and Professor Bernadette Watson.
For more information, please visit https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernadette_Watson2
Patient safety and adverse events prevention
This research foregrounds the importance of intergroup relations and the roles of cultural norms in the hospital system. In the proposed project, the International Research Centre for the Advancement of Health Communication (IRCAHC) builds on work conducted in Australia and the USA. In this new project, we systematically examine how hospital cultural norms in Hong Kong influence the way health professionals perceive communication with colleagues and the relationship of these norms with safe patient care. We will also investigate how health professionals describe communication behaviours that led to adverse patient events. The principal investigator of this two-phase project is Professor Bernadette Watson, Director of the IRCAHC and Ms. Ivy Wu is the Research Assistant.
Current Progress
In Phase 1 we wrote a report comprising secondary data from Risk Alert and Annual Reports on Sentinel and Serious Untoward Events issued by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority from 2007 to 2017. Only incidents documented in both the Risk Alert newsletters and the annual reports were analyzed. The report identifies the role of communication in sentinel events and serious untoward events that occurred in Hong Kong over the past decade and establishes which events are most common in the hospital setting. The report also offers recommendations to ensure better patient care from the perspective of communication, which mirror the Root Cause Analysis panel’s recommendations but highlight issues around communication specificity. This phase is now complete and a publication detailing this work is in preparation.
Phase 2 involved semi-structured interviews with health professionals at Hong Kong public hospitals, which explored their perspectives on barriers and facilitators in patient care. We particularly focused on the role of communication, leadership and hospital norms based on the knowledge obtained from Phase 1. We interviewed 69 participants, representing a diverse range of health professions, disciplines and levels of seniority. Transcription and data analysis is in progress.
For more information, please visit https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernadette_Watson2
