2023 year in review

2023 was another tumultuous year with many conflicts starting or continuing around the world and undermining global peace and well-being for all. Of greatest concern is the impact on health, racial, and social inequities among many populations and groups that lost their homes and livelihood and/or saw the worsening of health and sanitary conditions in their countries. Our thoughts are with the many people who lost their loved ones this past year or live in a state of uncertainty and fear while waiting to be reunited with the people they love. At the Journal, we join many other organizations and leaders in calling for world peace, compassionate leadership, wisdom, and empathy. We root for humanity to prevail across all of these conflicts.

The year also marked some remarkable progress in the discovery or implementation of new health and technology advances. Of notice, we gained new insights on long COVID, which increasingly resembles a neurological disease [1]. This is a foundational step that may lead to the development of suitable treatments for the many people who live with long COVID [1]. A new RSV vaccine was introduced to protect older adults [2], which is another milestone in public health immunization efforts to control or minimize disease outbreaks. Artificial intelligence (AI) more evidently started to change the way many people work [3] and also entered the field of medicine, including as a means of disease diagnosis [4], therefore calling for systematic efforts and standard guidelines to assess the credibility and ethics of AI-related information [5].

Reports from media outlets confirmed that people’s trust in institutions is declining, including trust in the media and judicial institutions [6], and that trust in science and health information is continuing to drop to new lows [7]. On some good news, younger people are starting to drink less, at least in the United States [6], and other high income countries [8]. Way to go!

Around the world, climate change and people’s actions continued to ravage our planet [9], with environmental devastation and impact on agriculture and people’s livelihood in many places of the world. The impact of climate change on health – and global health outcomes – is no longer debatable as also highlighted by an editorial our Journal had the honor to publish and sign alongside hundreds of leading peer review publications [10,11].

The World Health Organization launched the largest repository of health inequality data, which to date is ‘the most comprehensive global collection of publicly available disaggregated data and evidence on population health and its determinants [12].’ Health inequities though persist or increased in many countries, calling for continued and unrelentless efforts at the policy, intervention, and research levels.

And these are just a few of the many things that kept us awake at night or gave us hope during 2023.

Amid these many world events, our Journal brought to our readers and broader scientific community many insights from health communication research, policy, and practice that we hope will contribute to future research directions and new policies, and most importantly to health, behavior, and social change on the issues of our time. We did so with deep gratitude to our authors, peer-reviewers, editorial board, editorial team, and publisher for their passion and commitment to science and to making a difference.

JCIH turned 15 years old in 2023, marking an important milestone in the Journal’s efforts to inform ‘understanding, research, policy, and practice on the role of health and risk communication … across the fields of healthcare, public health, global health and medicine [13].’ Our readership increased to almost 70,200 downloads in 2023 up from 67,000 in the previous year. The number of submissions JCIH received also increased of 47% in 2023. We also continued to focus on encouraging an equity- and community-driven approach to health and risk communication via many of our calls for papers and many of the articles we published.

In response to the global trust crisis in science and health information, JCIH published a special December issue on The Science of Trust: Building and Restoring Trust in Science and Health Information across Patient, Community and Population Settings [14], which is part of the Journal’s broader Science of Trust Initiative [15] and includes research insights and perspectives by authors from several countries around the world, including the United States, India, and Norway. We were honored to work on co-editing this special issue with leaders from the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH)/National Cancer Institute (NCI).

2023 articles collections focused on timely topics such as COVID-19-related insights from communication research and practice on the third anniversary of the pandemic [16], and Cultural and Spiritual Influences on Health and Communication [17]. We also issued two calls for papers – one on Climate Change, Health and Vulnerability, and the other on Bias Reduction in Healthcare Communication in partnership with the Academy for Professionalism in Healthcare (APHC) – to explore the role of social and behavior change communication (SBCC) in addressing these important issues at the global level. Stay tuned for these article collections that will be published soon in our upcoming 2024 issues.

As we look at 2024, we renew our commitment to our scientific community about being always on the forefront of key health and communication issues and to provide our authors and readers with rigorous peer reviewed processes, and innovative research findings and perspectives. We also continue to be committed to expanding upon the diversity and number of team members (e.g. peer reviewers, editorial board members) who contribute to our Journal, and to make all possible efforts to attract submissions from a diverse pool of authors and countries. Most importantly, our pledge to you all is to ensure we keep fulfilling our mission with high integrity and standards in 2024 and always.

Happy 2024 and thank you for your readership! May the Year of the Dragon bring you the kind of influence and strength we all need to address the health and social challenges of our time!

In this issue

In addition to this editorial, the front matter section of this issue of the Journal includes a Letter on the importance on non-violent communication to promote a culture of healing and well-being among healthcare professionals (authored by Carina Schmid). Our peer-reviewed articles focus on a variety of topics ranging from language access research for community health, to media coverage of COVID-19 vaccines in Ghana, to how health literacy is taught across different health professions, to factors influencing shared-decision making for surgeons performing complex operations. The issue also includes an article collection on Insights for Communication Interventions in Maternal, Childbirth and Infant Health Settings. We hope you find these articles helpful to your professional efforts and thinking and will be able to cite them in your own work. Happy reading!

Ethical approval

This article is an editorial/opinion piece, which didn't involve any human participants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).