The Handbook of Health Communication brings together the current body of scholarly work in health communication. With its expansive scope, it offers an introduction for those new to this area, summarizes work for those already learned in the area, and suggests avenues for future research on the relationships between communicative processes and health/health care delivery.

The Handbook begins with a macro perspective on the contribution of theory to health communication. It then illuminates the scope of health communication around the contextual frameworks traditionally used in the discipline of communication. The contents are organized into six parts, which break out as follows:

*Part I: Introduction addresses some introductory theoretical and metatheoretical issues related to health communication.
*Part II: Provider-Patient Interaction Issues discusses such issues as communication skills training, outcomes of provider-patient interaction, disclosure issues, methods for studying provider-patient interaction, and special populations.
*Part III: Social and Community Health Issues emphasizes such issues as community organizing and health risk management, social support, everyday interpersonal communication and health, and marginalized populations.
*Part IV: Organizational Issues includes chapters on organizational forms, stress and social support, groups and teams in health care, organizational rhetoric, and working well.
*Part V: Media Issues offers chapters on health campaigns and communication design strategies, narrowcast health messages, telemedicine, health public relations and information in the media, and health literacy.
*Part VI: Lessons and Challenges From the Field focuses on lessons learned in the field, including important contributions by those who have worked to combine academic with policy/practitioner perspectives within the field of health communication, and concludes with a focus on ethics in health communication research.

With contributions from top scholars in health communication, public health, and related areas, this Handbook establishes a benchmark in current scholarship and research. The chapters included here provide definitive examinations of the various aspects of health communication, and encourage readers to delve further into these areas on their own through an examination of the representative citations. The Handbook of Health Communication is intended for students, researchers, and practitioners with interests in the various aspects of health communication, and it will serve as an essential resource and reference for all concerned with health communication issues.