Empathy and compassion are important elements of public health communications. Empathetic communications show an awareness and consideration of your audiences’ emotions, beliefs, and experiences. Compassionate communications act on awareness and consideration to support and inform audiences in a responsive way.

This guide provides practical considerations for centering empathy and compassion in public health communications using the H.E.A.R.T. method. This guidance is an expansion of PHCC’s original Communicating with H.E.A.R.T. resource, published in February 2024.

The original version of this resource was published in July 2025. You’ll find a lightly revised version below, published July 2025.