Week 9: The San Diego Fire

It has been a scary week for everyone in San Diego. I cannot imagine what must go through the minds of the people who lost their homes and had to evacuate. I have not been personally affected by the fire, but I did have a friend who lives in Chula Vista and was very scared for her since the fire was so close to her home. I have to say a thousand “thank you” to our great firefighters and emergency responders, they did an outstanding job! I’m from Washington State and I’ve never seen a wildfire like this….it rains too much! I am very impressed with the people in San Diego, the volunteers, and the outpouring donations and just the kindness that this tragedy brought out. It definitely tells people not from this city that San Diegans rally together to take care of each other when tragedy strikes! The community just came together and helped those in need! People’s kindness still exists; it’s there, although I think in our every day “busy” lives we forget the act of kindness, we forget to be kind to each other.
I hope that everyone remained safe and with family through this devastating event. Watching the fire on television since Sunday, it is humbling to see what Mother Nature can do to us even with the power and technology that our country possesses. I’m hugging my daughter and my husband just a little bit more each day after this fire. My hope is that we don’t forget to help those people who are still struggling to put what is left together from this tragedy. My husband and I decided to donate money to the Red Cross; this is the only way we feel that we can help even if it is just a little bit.
Stay safe, be kind, and be hopeful, we live in a great and beautiful city!

SAN DIEGO FIRE PHOTOS

Week 8: Message Strategies in Health Communication

Cancer - Colorectal Cancer's Screen for Life Campaign Public Service Announcements
This a great website and videos on testimonials of different celebrities encouring people to get their colorectal cancer screening done. It's great since these are people/celebrities that have had this screening done!

Today class was again interesting, the groups did an excellent job on our first Mini-project. Hooray for everyone! Again, I learned a lot in class today. The lecture on “framing our message” with our target audience in the center of our health campaign universe. We learned different ways to shape our message, from using every day relatable situations (slice of life), to using fear, humor, and testimonial from people. So what did I learn about myself? What kind of health campaigns/messages do I listen to? I think we’ve talked about “personal relevance” in class a few weeks ago and I think for me and the way my brain process information, l listen more to people who have been through the struggle. Someone who is promoting colorectal cancer screening should have gone through the procedure. I can relate more to someone who does testimonials since it seems to be more believable…from struggling and surviving breast cancer to suffering from a chronic disease like diabetes. I also tend to pay more attention to health messages that “tug” at the heartstring and realistic compare to my own experiences. I can relate to it since all of the spokesperson has had the screening done. The recommendation is 50 years of age, but it is a successful campaign, at least on me, since I keep thinking as I was watching the video that if they can do it I can too! Not that I need it, not yet anyway….I have a few years to go!
We also talked about “reference” point. What are we comparing these messages to? It was an interesting exercise that Dr. Engelberg did in class about the price of the calculator ($20) and the computer ($2,000). Most of us will care about a $10 savings on a $20 calculator, but not on a $2,000 computer! $10 dollars is $10 dollars…does it really matter that the computer is $2,000? Apparently it does, it’s a way of thinking that we are paying $2,000 anyway so what’s $10 more! Believe me; I am guilty of this way of thinking! There are so many things to think about when creating a health campaign, I’m hoping that I can take away some basic principles we’ve learned in class and apply it when I come back to my real world! Have a great week everyone!

LOW HEALTH LITERACY PUTS PATIENTS AT GREATER RISK FOR...

This video really shows what we talked about in class today about health literacy. It's good to see that effective communication is believe to finally affect patient safety. Medications to help control high blood pressure, diabetes and pain can help people manage a chronic condition, but if taken the wrong way can cause more harm to the body that help it.

Faces of Influenza PSA

This is a great Flu Vaccination campaign and it really does a good job identifying the people who really need to be vaccinated and are at risk. Plus the American Lung Association hired a really famous person to be the spokesperson! I just learned for my group project what our target audience will be and what segment of the population we need to focus on for a health campaign about Flu Vaccination.

Diabetes: Get Serious

This is an add campaign about diabetes in Canada. It's very sobering to me and it really hits home how diabetes can kill people if not well managed. Since diabetes affects my family it's a great add with a "shock factor".

Week 5 - Target audience Segmentation

I can't believe it took 5 weeks for me to finally post a YouTube video in my blog! I still feel that "blogging" thing is still a little foreign to me. But hey, I posted a video this week! Anyway, I thought this video really related to our class topic this week of target audience segmentation. The video is very specific about targeting children to "get up" and move. It's a childhood obesity health communication campaign. I think it's very smart to use the main characters in Shrek, c'mon who doesn't like donkey! Correct me if I'm wrong, but do you know a 4 or 5 year old who doesn't know Shrek, donkey and Fiona. Just hearing donkey sing in this video made me want to get up and dance!We covered many topics in class last Monday, from seeing a video on formative research that talked about learning the values, attitudes, and behavior of consumers to our outdoor group exercise on our target audience segmentation. One thing that really stayed in my mind was when Professor Engelberg emphasized the importance of "knowing" our own values, attitudes, and behavior as health promoters/communicators. I think it's true that if we are not aware of our own values, attitudes, and behavior we can perhaps try to "manipulate", in a bad way, a health campaign into what "we" think is the right path to take and ignore our target populations' needs. As we talked about in class, we might not feel empathy for our target audience. I know for sure that as a breast health educator and case manager of breast cancer patient, I was trying to feel empathy for the mix emotions, and grieving process that my patients feel during their diagnosis. However, I know that I could never ever put myself in their shoes due to the fact that I've never experienced what it is like to have breast cancer. I would not wish this disease on anybody.

Peace everyone and stay healthy and happy!