3/ A health department’s functions and how fact-checkers can work with some of these functions

A health department’s job is to protect the health of the community from health issues that are preventable.

To take a step back, it’s important to remember what exactly health departments do at the national, regional, district, and city levels.

Health departments as a rule are chronically underfunded, understaffed, and are responsible for a huge range of health topics.
The same health department might be responsible for addressing food safety and foodborne illnesses, increasing vaccination rates among older adults, to preventing HIV and TB, to obesity and nutrition, to preparedness for future emergencies.
Each of these programs inevitably have their own funding streams and sometimes different donors. Often they don’t have a lot of resources in communications.
They focus on behavior change, which is partially covered by health education and health promotion experts. This part is usually underfunded too.

You can’t depend on the health system to pull you into partnership because they have sporadic funding and parts of the system don’t know what others are doing.

Strategically, you need to build a wide networks of contacts and present yourself as a strategic partner, not what they consider a narrow fact-checking organization that only the public affairs or press officer would be engaging with.

How fact-checkers can work with health departments

Here’s a few examples to expand your horizons beyond fact-checking in support of this very understaffed, overwhelmed and overworked group of people.

Highlighted in green are public health functions where a fact-checking organization can pitch themselves as a strategic partner, with skill sets and expertise that they have.

Engage communities and partners to promote health

For example, in Indonesia, MAFINDO does a lot of civil society engagement work to promote digital literacy in community members in partnership with the ministry of health. They developed specific teaching materials for health and digital literacy for elderly people.

Advocate for health in policies and laws

I would hope more fact-checking organizations advocate for health in policies and laws that protect freedom of expression but also protect consumers. There are many medical associations in different countries that have advocated for protection against harassment of health workers and doxing on social media platforms, challenges that many of you have faced yourselves.

Build a diverse public health workforce

When it comes to building diversity in the health workforce, you have valuable skills that you can share.
A popular sustainability model for organizations with fact-checking skills is to provide training to health department staff. This is not to train the local health promotion officer to be an investigative journalist or fact-checker, but to better use tools available to them to promote credible, accurate health information being shared by the health department.
Social media and digital skills are extremely difficult to find in health department and fact-checking organizations have them in spades.

Conduct research and evaluations to protect health

The next bucket about conducting research and evaluation to protect health might sound really scary, if you’re not a researcher. However, partnering with health departments and academic institutions to support better research on health misinformation will help inform better public health actions and policies that protect people’s health.
A big problem in this space is that a lot of research is generated on university campuses or in newsrooms without exposure to the day-to-day realities and challenges of public health. This means that well meaning health misinformation research goes unused because it is not applicable to public health. Just because you’re fact-checking a health claim doesn’t mean you’re doing public health.

Communicate and educate on health

And the final bucket about communicating and education on health topics is probably the most obvious way that fact-checking organizations can support the spread of credible, accurate health information and prebunk and debunk misinformation.
If the health department finds them important in different health topics, many of these activities usually get contracted out to marketing or communications agencies or to consultants. Fact-checking organizations would have a competitive edge in this activity.

Health departments and fact-checkers naturally play different roles in the information environment concerning health.

It’s also important to remember that health is very personal and everyone has an opinion about it. Those can’t be fact-checked but often drive the amplification of health narratives.

In this diagram you can see the spectrum of types of information on a health topic – they might have questions or concerns, they might be actively looking for information but can’t find it from a credible sources, and mis and disinformation.

The left side of this diagram is far more common in the information ecosystem and easier to address by health departments than the right hand side.

This is where fact-checkers come in, especially if you’re expert at addressing mis- and disinformation.

A consistent challenge that fact-checkers face is lack of access to health experts, difficulty accessing latest data, understanding emerging scientific literature and degree of consensus, and translating scientific language into plain language. These are all things that health departments are better positioned to help with.

Next section: 4/ Six steps to building a business case to fact-check in health

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