The reason I’m sending is that in the last year I’ve also been presenting at health care conferences – simply to encourage people to improve listening (as this is what helps us develop empathy and sympathy to others) and teaching the ‘power of story’ in health care. I share the success stories of people like Dr. Rita Charon, or the outcomes on healthcare costs through The Esther Story, or some of the wonderful success stories coming out of Saskatchewan, ‘Patient First’ focus.

And, I am presenting at an upcoming Chronic Disease Conference in Saskatoon this June and talking to them to set up a Public Forum to encourage people to ‘tell their stories about care and their experiences with chronic disease’. I will definitely be sharing this PodCast with the organizing committee as Marlene shared so many wonderful tips on hosting these storytelling panels. Anyway, I just wanted to connect and tell you how much I enjoyed this PodCast – keep up the great work and encourage others to keep telling stories.

Now I’m off to check out Marlene’s recommended website link.

Thank you, Norma

You may be interested in my experience with texting for large-scale hard-to-reach targets in developing countries, especially brief in-service messages to trained volunteer Community Health Workers who had received some basic training in reproductive health. In the past, the challenge of providing those trained CHWs with in-service updating was formidably expensive in large countries such India, Pakistan and Indonesia, because large numbers of CHWs had to be transported to central meeting places for, say, an introduction to Misoprostol. But in some parts of Uttar Pradesh I learned that the vast majority of CHWs used cell phones and could therefore receive and learn from well-constructed short text messages to large groups. The CHWs were being trained with the help of USAID projects implemented by The Futures Group and DKT International.

I find that a fascinating idea. I also gave a talk a while back when I worked for GHA about how hospitals should be monitoring social media for both positive and negative ideas. We had a local hospital that did – and when someone tweeted that she had been waiting for hours in an ER, the hospital’s social media specialist contacted her and got her situation ironed out to her satisfaction. If someone puts on their Facebook page that they are totally peeved with any institution, it should be addressed – just because the audience is enormous.

My hope is that, with the growing number of people pursuing degrees in Health Communication (HCOM) and gaining expertise in assessing audiences and developing the kind of messaging Dr. Mackert refers to, we’ll also start to see a change the nature of many public health campaigns out there.

And I appreciate the nod to local universities for collaboration and expertise–my program has a local HCOM student that will be developing a campaign design and messaging for one of our projects, as her thesis; something that will benefit both of us!

I tried to listen to the interview you did with Valerie Fletcher. I could understand you very well, but was unable to understand Ms. Fletcher. Her words seem to be strung together. Is there a written form of this interview or a way to hear it more clearly?

Thank you,

Sascha

Thank you.