Grant: Project Grant

Misinformation worsens public health in many ways, from reducing vaccination rates to preventing people from seeking life-saving cancer treatments, and has be argued to attack the very fabric of a democratic society. Efforts to combat health misinformation have mostly focused on providing people with better information or helping them to identify misinformation. Such approaches focus primarily on the information itself. Implementation science can bring new approaches to this effort, such as evidence about how to change behaviours, using specific rather than general change strategies, and engaging patients in the design of change strategies. Our proposed work will bring these new ideas to bear on the problem of misinformation in public health and health care, use new methods to assemble relevant expert knowledge and understand ethics challenges of combating misinformation, and design new misinformation-combating tools based on implementation science, behavioural theory, and real-world experience. This work will enable partner organisations specifically, and public health organisations more broadly, to be more systematic and effective in their efforts to reduce the effects of misinformation and improve public health.