A Video is Worth a 1000 Words: Creating Videos to Support a Consumer Health Information Page

Background: In order to better engage visitors to a "For Health Consumers" website, an academic health sciences library, an academic community engagement office, a public library, and a community-based organization pooled their strengths to develop supporting videos. Videos combined practical patient empowerment techniques with information finding skills. The four topics were: “Finding a doctor”, “preparing for an appointment”, “talking with your doctor”, and “help from a public library”. The intent was to provide an additional method for sharing the educational information presented on the website in order to engage varied learning styles and empower patients to actively participate in their healthcare.

Description: Project development included pre-production, production, and post-production. Financial support was NNLM/MAR grant funded. In pre-production the scripts were developed collaboratively by librarians and community outreach faculty. Actors were recruited from the standardized patient pool and the public library. A local film crew was hired. Filming locations, a hotel suite and public library, were selected. Rough cuts were filmed to preview to two focus groups. Scripts were revised based on their input. During the production phase, the film crew, actors, and project leadership spent 1.5 days filming. In post-production, the team reviewed the final mastered cuts prior to incorporating the videos on the website. Planned promotional efforts included community screening at the public library and linking to the academic site by community partners. Final evaluation was to include a short survey distributed at a community screening and monitoring video website views.

Conclusion: This project’s strength rests in the community collaboration process. It is an example of how academic and public librarians can work together with academic community outreach professionals and community-based organizations to develop patient empowerment projects. Unfortunately, the evaluation and promotion of the videos was significantly impacted by COVID-19. The community screening and all promotional activities were paused as libraries shutdown and re-imagined services. There have been preliminary discussions to reschedule the community screening when public libraries re-open. Although views have not reached initial expectations, patients have been postponing doctor appointments, reducing the current need. As partners continue to adapt their workflows to the ongoing pandemic, the team plans to resume promotional efforts, including linking the videos to the partners’ websites.