“Good communication is rarely about saying more; it is usually about saying the right thing at the right moment to the right person.”
1. Could you briefly introduce yourself and share your experiences in terms of your journey in media, communication, and engaging with stakeholders?
My name is Febina Benny, and I work as the Public Relations Coordinator at HCI Australia, which brings together the Institute of Health and Nursing Australia (IHNA) and the Institute of Health Management (IHM). I am also currently completing my Master’s degree in Media and Communication, and that combination of practitioner and student has really shaped how I approach this field.
My role sits at the intersection of several different streams of work. On any given week I am handling PR communication and stakeholder liaison, supporting media content and internal campaigns, assisting with branding and cross-campus coordination, and collaborating with the digital team on creative and viral marketing approaches. Alongside that, I coordinate institutional events, including graduation ceremonies and strategic workshops, which bring our executive leadership, academic representatives, partner institutions, students, and external vendors into the same conversation.
What this mix has taught me is that communication in a healthcare education setting is rarely about one channel or one audience. It is about holding a consistent voice across very different touchpoints, from a formal stakeholder briefing on one side, to a social campaign aimed at prospective students on the other, and making sure each one genuinely serves the people it is meant to reach.
2. In your current role, you must have come across various kinds of people. What have your experiences taught you about communication?
The biggest lesson has been that clarity is not the same as simplicity, and that respect for the audience matters far more than polish. In a single day I might move from drafting a message for senior academic leadership, to liaising with an international partner, to briefing the digital team on a campaign concept, to guiding a graduating student through ceremony logistics. None of these audiences needs the same tone, the same level of detail, or the same channel.
What I have learned is to listen first. Before I write or design anything, I try to understand what the person already knows, what they are worried about, and what decision or action the message is meant to support. Good communication is rarely about saying more; it is usually about saying the right thing at the right moment to the right person.
I have also come to appreciate that communication is relational, not transactional. In a healthcare education setting, the people we speak with are often navigating significant life decisions, such as migration, career change, or clinical placement. Acknowledging that context, even briefly, changes the quality of every interaction that follows.
3. You have also worked in inclusive education settings. How has this experience shaped the way you approach communication and community engagement?
Working within a healthcare education environment that serves a diverse cohort, including many international students and professionals from varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds, has fundamentally shaped how I think about inclusive communication. I no longer assume a “default” reader. Instead, I design for the range of people who will actually encounter the message, whether that is on a campus noticeboard, in an internal email, on a social feed, or at a live event.
In practice, this means choosing plain language over jargon wherever possible, using visuals and structured formats so information is easier to scan, and building in multiple entry points so people can engage in the way that suits them. It also means being mindful of cultural nuance, of accessibility, and of the fact that silence or non-response often signals a barrier in the communication rather than a lack of interest.
Inclusion has taught me that engagement is not measured by how many people we reach, but by how many feel genuinely invited into the conversation.
4. In simple terms, what does knowledge exchange mean to you, especially in the context of education and public communication?
To me, knowledge exchange is a two-way street. It is not an expert delivering information to a passive audience; it is a genuine conversation where professional knowledge and lived experience both count as valid contributions.
In an education and public communication context, that means our institutions have something to share, such as research, clinical expertise, and accredited curricula, but the community also brings something we cannot generate on our own. They bring real questions, cultural insight, and a sense of what matters at the level of everyday life. When these two flows meet deliberately, the result is knowledge that is stronger, more grounded, and more useful than either side could produce alone.
For a communications professional, the job is to create the conditions for that exchange to happen honestly, rather than to simply broadcast one side of it.
5. As we now have various technologies such as AI affecting healthcare education, why is it important for us to involve the public in such discussions?
AI is reshaping how future nurses and healthcare professionals are trained, assessed, and supported, from intelligent tutoring and simulation to administrative automation and decision-support tools. The people who will ultimately feel the effects of these changes are patients, students, families, and communities. It would be a mistake to design these systems in a closed loop that includes only technologists and administrators.
Involving the public matters for three reasons. First, trust: healthcare relies on trust, and any technology introduced without transparency risks eroding it. Second, quality: public input helps surface blind spots around bias, accessibility, and cultural safety that experts alone may miss. Third, legitimacy: decisions about how AI is used in education that trains future clinicians are not purely technical decisions, they are social ones, and the communities affected deserve a meaningful voice in shaping them.
Strategic silence, or engaging the public only after decisions are made, almost always costs more in the long run than genuine early dialogue.
6. From your experience, how can communication professionals help people better understand complex topics such as AI in healthcare education?
Our role is to be translators and bridge-builders, not gatekeepers. Complex topics become accessible when we start from what people already care about, such as safety, fairness, quality of care, and career prospects, and work outward from there, rather than leading with technical detail.
A few practical things make a real difference. Using concrete examples, such as what AI looks like in a nursing simulation, in marking feedback, or in rostering, helps people picture the change. Being honest about limitations and uncertainties is just as important as explaining benefits; audiences can sense when they are only being sold the positive side. Visual storytelling, such as simple diagrams, short videos, and infographics, carries a lot of weight, especially for multilingual audiences.
Above all, communication professionals have to resist the pressure to oversimplify in a way that strips nuance. The goal is not to make the topic seem easy; it is to make it approachable enough that people feel equipped to ask their own questions.
7. Events, workshops, and community discussions are often used to engage people. How can these platforms help create meaningful dialogue between experts and the public?
Events and workshops, when designed well, are one of the few settings where hierarchy can soften and real dialogue can emerge. In my own work coordinating graduation ceremonies, strategic workshops, and stakeholder sessions, I have seen how a well-structured event can do what a press release or email simply cannot: it puts people in the same room, at the same time, around a shared question.
For these platforms to generate meaningful dialogue rather than one-way presentations, a few things need to be in place. The agenda has to leave genuine space for audience voice, not just a token Q&A at the end. Experts need to be briefed to listen as much as they speak. The format itself, for example roundtables, panels, small breakout groups, or interactive demos, should match the outcome we want, whether that is co-design, feedback, or awareness.
Community discussions also work best when they are sustained rather than one-off. A single forum can spark interest, but it is the ongoing relationship, through followup communications, advisory groups, and visible changes informed by what was heard, that turns engagement into genuine knowledge exchange.
8. Looking ahead, how do you think public engagement will shape the way people understand new technologies in healthcare education?
I believe public engagement will increasingly become the difference between technologies that are adopted confidently and technologies that are resisted or abandoned. In the years ahead, the communities around healthcare education, including students, patients, clinicians, regulators, and families, will not be satisfied with being informed after the fact. They will expect to be consulted, and rightly so.
From my perspective, this shift is a positive one. When engagement is built into the design process, people understand new technologies not as something being done to them, but as something being developed with them. That changes the emotional relationship entirely. Fear and suspicion give way to informed curiosity, and the conversation moves from “should we use AI at all?” to the far more productive question of “how should we use it well?”
For institutions like ours, this means investing in communication as a core capability, not a finishing touch. It means training our academics and leaders to be comfortable in public dialogue, using multiple channels and formats so diverse communities can participate, and being transparent about both what AI can do and what it should not be asked to do.
Ultimately, I see public engagement as the mechanism that keeps innovation human. Healthcare education exists to prepare people to care for other people. As long as our use of new technologies is guided by the voices of the communities we serve, I am optimistic that we can introduce AI in ways that strengthen, rather than distance, that human core.