For years, I've been collecting survey responses from women across India about their health and where they get their health information. My paper, [link to your Springer paper], looks at urban and rural women in Aligarh District: which sources they use, how easy different media are to reach, and how much they trust each one.
The biggest lesson wasn't what I first expected. Health communication isn't only about access. It also depends on trust, on context, and on the social and cultural world a woman lives in.
And this isn't only an Indian story. A WHO-led survey across 17 European countries found that anywhere from 25% to 75% of adults had limited health literacy, meaning they found it hard to access, understand, judge and use health information. Lower health literacy was linked to more chronic illness and poorer self-rated health.
In one of my own surveys of 500 women, 72% of the rural respondents had inadequate health literacy. Nationally, NFHS-5 (2019-21) shows that only 0.9% of women aged 30-49 had been screened for breast cancer. I'm bringing this up now because October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, when campaigns are at their most visible. My study didn't measure breast cancer awareness, but these numbers show how wide the gap can be between a campaign and a woman's ability to act on it.
Women today get health information from reels, WhatsApp forwards, television, health workers and, more and more, AI chatbots. In all that noise, accurate and clear health communication matters. A woman needs information that is correct, easy to follow and comes from someone she trusts.
So I think we should change the question. Instead of only asking, "Did the message reach her?", we should ask: Did she understand it? Did she trust it? Could she act on it?
As an independent researcher, I'm now exploring how these findings could become practical, community-level communication. One idea is to have trusted local voices, such as ASHA workers and women's groups, talk about health in plain, local language. It's an idea I'm exploring, not an approach that has been tested.
I'd welcome your thoughts. Have you seen anything that helped women, or other communities, understand and act on health information? I'd love to learn from your experience in the comments.
Sources: WHO/Europe survey on health literacy in 17 countries (M-POHL, 2021); NFHS-5 (2019-21), as analyzed by ORF.