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The Health Educommunication Centre (CES-IMS) aims to stimulate the acquisition, improvement, or change of habits, the recognition of rights and duties, and to equip people against disinformation.
Educommunication, also known as media education or media literacy (“educomunicação” in Portuguese), is a term that the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) recognizes officially.
🔘 For the Brazilian Association of Researchers and Professionals in Educommunication (ABPEducom), it is understood as a guiding model for socio-educational – communicative practices.
🔘 These practices are aimed at encouraging participatory processes in formal (school), non-formal (NGO-run) and informal environments (throughout the territory), ensuring shared management of communication resources.
🔘 Applied to health literacy, Educommunication is a relatively new praxis. It is still at the preliminary exploratory research stage, especially regarding the challenge of making it highly participatory.
🔘 People may have access to health facilities, doctors, dentists, nurses, psychologists, and physiotherapists, as well as tests, medicines, and so forth. However, such access in itself does not create cognitive and social empowerment for these people.
🔘 In other words, healthcare accessibility alone is not enough to lead users to acquire, improve, or change their habits, whether in terms of health promotion, disease prevention, or adequate self-care. Certainly, it does not make individuals actively aware of their rights and responsibilities, nor does it empower them to confront health disinformation.
🔘 In turn, Educommunication applied to health literacy can make a decisive contribution to meeting all these challenges
(WITTLIN, Flavio. Master’s thesis, National School of Public Health/Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, ENSP/Fiocruz, 2023)
I’m a medical graduate from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and act as a consultant for NGO Viramundo. This non-profit promotes health and ecological sanitation through health literacy initiatives.
I created and coordinated the international course in Health and Environmental Education at PUC-Rio (HEED). Viramundo received an honorable mention from the Ministry of Health for the HEED course at PUC-Rio.
I advised and managed the Sesc RJ Health Program, respectively from 2014 to 2016 and from 2018 to 2021, overseeing nutrition, dentistry, health education, and women’s health. I delivered voluntary medical care to dozens of Fecomércio RJ System staff members, board members, and their relatives, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I have a master’s degree in public health from the National School of Public Health, ENSP/Fiocruz (2023), with a thesis focused on educommunication for health literacy purposes. I’ve written on the effectiveness of this, having launched a manual on a special tool for universal use (Your Health in 3 Takes).
I‘m dedicated to improving health promotion and healthcare with innovative health literacy strategies.