Our study sought to explore the actual and potential roles of patients, physicians, and pharmacists, as well as their shared challenges and opportunities, in improving the safety of medication use during pregnancy. We conducted virtual focus groups with 48 women and in-depth interviews with nine physicians and five pharmacists. Qualitative analysis revealed that all three groups of participants reported “playing it safe,” the need for an engaged patient making informed decisions, challenges surrounding communication about pregnancy status, and a lack of patient-centric resources. Patients, physicians, and pharmacists are highly motivated to protect developing babies from potential harms of medication use during pregnancy while maintaining the patient’s health. Strategic messaging could maximize the effectiveness of these interactions by helping physicians discuss the benefits and risks of medication use during pregnancy, pharmacists screen for pregnancy and counsel on medication safety, and patients using medications to share pregnancy intentions with their providers pre-pregnancy.

This article discusses the social marketing planning process and strategies used to design a preconception health campaign, Show Your Love, launched in February 2013. Developing a social marketing strategy for preconception health is a challenging endeavor, in part because preconception health represents a set of diverse behaviors and the audience for the campaign is quite large, encompassing all women of childbearing age whether they intend to become pregnant or not. The network of organizations implementing the campaign, the National Preconception Health Consumer Workgroup, required a broad audience segmentation strategy; therefore, two large audiences were selected. This commentary describes the two primary audiences selected for the campaign based on the Transtheoretical Model—intenders (those in contemplation, preparation, and action) and nonintenders (precontemplators)—and explores how levels of knowledge, motivations, the campaign product, and the campaign goals are distinct for each audience. Additionally, the authors describe potential extensions to the segmentation strategy that could offer finer grained approaches for social marketers who may be building on the Show Your Love campaign or designing other programs in this area.

This article presented a new product development tool for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). People with IDD who also have extreme low literacy (ELL) have unique communication needs; public health communicators often face challenges developing effective communication materials for this audience. To support CDC communication specialists with the development of communication products for adults with IDD/ELL, CDC, with its partners RTI International and CommunicateHealth, created a product development tool for this audience through literature review, expert input, and interviews with adults with IDD/ELL and caregivers of adults with IDD/ELL. To build evidence around the principles described in the tool, RTI conducted interviewer-administered surveys with 100 caregivers who support people with IDD/ELL. During the interviews, we presented caregivers with stimuli (portions of a communication product) that either did or did not apply a single principle and asked which would be easier for the person they support to understand. Across all 14 principles tested, the caregiver respondents indicated that the principle-based version would be easier for the person they support to understand compared with the non-principle-based version(s). These findings provide additional evidence to support the principles included in CDC’s Tool for Developing Products for People with IDD/ELL.