Health communication education has come to be appreciated as an important ingredient for the improvement of both an individual or a community's health status. This paper examines the substence of health communication education, its role in disease prevention and control, as well as the appropriate methodologies to adopt for greater effectiveness. The ultimate goal of this paper is to stimulate health communication education practitioners into coming up with ideas on how communication can be made to play a more effective role in effecting behaviourial change, and thus an overall improvement of people's health. Impediments to achieving this goal as well as known approaches that have been implemented with success are highlighted. Furthermore, the paper argues a case for the need to adopt a two-way approach in communicating health messages unlike the traditional system where the source was considered more important than the destination. The individual's needs, preferences and environment, argues the paper, count in determining the extent of success in a given health communication education campaign.
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