News and Insights

Messaging with the Three C’s: Clarity, Consistency, Compassion

August 27, 2025

In the waiting room of a crowded clinic, a mother scans a leaflet about childhood vaccines. The words are technical, and the font is small. She folds it back into her bag, still unsure what to do.

That single moment—confusion instead of clarity—can shape a decision that reverberates through a child’s life, a family, and a community.

Health messaging is not decoration. It is care. And the difference between effective and ineffective messaging often comes down to three qualities: clarity, consistency, and compassion.

Clarity: cutting through the noise

We live in a world saturated with health information—some accurate, some distorted, and much of it overwhelming.

Clarity doesn’t mean dumbing down. It means stripping away jargon, explaining risks and benefits in plain words, and making complex science understandable without losing accuracy.

When the World Health Organization shifted early COVID-19 guidance to the phrase “wash your hands, wear a mask, keep your distance,” uptake rose. Three actions. Three simple phrases. The science behind it was complicated; the messaging was not.

Patients are not policy wonks, and they should not be expected to parse statistical nuance. A message that takes three readings to understand is a message lost.

Consistency: the antidote to doubt

However, clarity is not enough if the message shifts with every press release. Inconsistency breeds mistrust.

Consider dietary guidelines. For decades, the advice swung from “avoid fat” to “avoid sugar” to “watch salt.” The whiplash left many consumers cynical. If “they” can’t agree, why should we listen?

Consistency doesn’t mean rigidity—science evolves, and messaging must reflect new evidence. But changes should be carefully explained, not presented as abrupt reversals. When guidelines do shift, explaining why—and showing the continuity of evidence—can preserve trust.

For frontline practitioners, consistency across institutions matters just as much. A GP who tells a patient one thing, only to have a hospital specialist say another, risks losing the patient’s confidence in both.

Compassion: the missing ingredient

Facts matter. Tone matters more than we sometimes admit.

Compassion in messaging means recognising the emotional weight of health decisions. It means speaking not only to minds but to fears, hopes, and vulnerabilities.

When public campaigns on mental health moved away from statistics about prevalence and towards messages of shared humanity—“It’s okay not to be okay”—help-seeking rose. Compassion reframes illness not as failure, but as part of life.

Compassion also respects context. Telling a low-income family to “eat five portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day” without acknowledging affordability risks sounding out of touch. Adjusting the message to include frozen or tinned options shows empathy and realism.

Messaging that heals

When clarity, consistency, and compassion align, messaging does more than inform. It can heal.

Take the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Early communication was fragmented, stigmatising, and inconsistent. Fear flourished. As messaging became clearer (“use a condom”), more consistent (endorsed across governments, NGOs, clinicians), and compassionate (campaigns focused on dignity and solidarity), uptake of prevention and treatment improved—and stigma began to soften.

The lesson is simple: people don’t only need to know what to do. They need to feel supported in doing it.

Where it goes wrong

The traps are familiar.

• Over-complication: drowning people in data instead of delivering a simple takeaway.
• Mixed signals: institutions contradicting each other in pursuit of nuance.
• Cold tone: presenting health as an abstract system rather than a lived experience.

Each fracture trust, and once trust is lost, even the clearest message may fail to reach the intended audience.

The systems view

Health messaging doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It flows through networks—clinicians, journalists, community leaders, social media influencers—and is interpreted through culture, politics, and personal experience.

That’s why clarity, consistency, and compassion must be embedded across the system. A patient who hears one tone from their doctor, another from a press headline, and a third from social media will default to confusion. Alignment multiplies impact.

What this means for communicators

The job of the health communicator is not only to craft catchy slogans. It’s to balance clarity, consistency, and compassion when speaking to patients, practitioners, policymakers, or the press.

This may mean testing messages with real audiences before rolling them out. It may mean translating campaigns into multiple languages or adapting them for a cultural context. It may mean training spokespeople to acknowledge uncertainty without sounding evasive.

And it always means resisting the urge to speak from behind a wall of acronyms and percentages.

The takeaway

Clarity gives people understanding. Consistency builds trust. Compassion earns willingness to act.

If any one of the three is left out, health communication risks confusion, doubt, or alienation. When they are combined, messaging becomes not just sticky but healing.

Because in health, words don’t just describe reality. They shape it. And when the message heals, so can the person.