Making use of expectation effects: How we pass on our knowledge. © SFB Treatment Expectation

Passing on knowledge: communication strategies for better patient care

Projekt SC
Team

Making use of expectation effects to improve patient care: This is the goal of our Collaborative Research Centre and it is why, from the very beginning, we have emphasized the importance of communicating the results of our research to the outside world as quickly and transparently as possible, enabling treatment providers to apply our findings and patients to benefit from them. We have established various communication channels for this purpose: From our Website and social media channels on Bluesky, X, Instagram, Facebook und YouTube to lectures, training courses and information events, as well as an intensive presence in specialist and popular media.

In focus: the next generation of doctors

With the start of the second funding period, we are expanding our already broad communication strategy by additionally targeting two important groups directly: medical students and patients. In this way, our scientific findings can be incorporated into the development, implementation and evaluation of special curriculum units that can be used to train the next generation of doctors to target expectation effects. In a later step, we plan to extend these educational activities to the in-service training of healthcare professionals.

The patient’s perspective makes research better

We also directly involve the representatives of various patient groups as well as individual patients in the planning, implementation and evaluation of our research, as we believe that including their perspective makes our research better. One of the ways we do this is through our Patient Advisory Board (PAB), in which researchers from our CRC regularly meet with selected patients. An aim of this dialogue is to develop types of information and materials that are individually tailored to people of different ages and backgrounds and with different diseases. These can then be disseminated via the established channels, but also by means of new, partly external communication channels.

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