Motivating Health Education with Music

this piece is dedicated to the over a

hundred thousand americans

who have died of covid19 during the

pandemic

and for all the health care workers who

have worked so hard to take care

of patients in this country

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so

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um

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on april 20th 1992

the rock band queen organized an hiv

aids awareness concert with the biggest

rock stars of the day

elton john u2 guns n roses

they organized this worldwide concert

to honor queen’s lead singer freddie

mercury who just

five months earlier have become the

first global celebrity

to die of aids the concert was broadcast

around the world to over a billion

people in 76

countries over the next decade

elton john further propelled the idea

of using music to teach about

hiv prevention through the elton john

aids foundation

these concerts deeply influence the way

we think about

and build health education campaigns

one-on-one

preventive medicine conversations are

important

but to really alter community behavior

you need to combine these efforts with a

platform

in order to magnify the public health

voice

and to reach large vulnerable patient

populations

for queen and for me that platform

is music health education projects that

combine

music are bold entertaining

and fun now this may come as a shock to

you

but i’m not a rock star guitarist like

queen’s brian may

however i do play the cello and i’m a

gastrologist

and over the past 18 years i’ve been

building health education campaigns

to teach young people about health

through using music as a platform and

today

i’d like to share with you six blueprint

tools

that can help you build a great health

education campaign

in your community tip number one build a

great team

during my first year of medical school

at emory university in atlanta

i started a national health education

campaign called music inspires health

teaming up music celebrities with

medical students

as well as public health experts from

around the country

in order to teach adolescents and young

adults

about health we gain the attention of

experts

from the cdc and our goal was to recruit

the number one public health expert in

this field and we identified

dr jim curran who at the time was dean

of emory’s

school of public health but in 1981

had been an epidemiologist at the cdc

and was sent to san francisco to help

track the original aids cases

he eventually built the cdc’s hiv

division and over the next decade help

the cdc

organize hiv prevention programs for

america

together we assembled a 45 member

national medical advisory board

including the director of public health

for los

angeles county the chief of sed control

for the state of california

several medical school deans as well as

three

previous cdc directors of hiv

std prevention this was the superstar

public health team we needed in order to

create

a stellar campaign and to get the

attention

of music celebrities we also built a

fundraising team

and we built literally an army over 150

medical students public health students

and volunteers

in order to stage a national rock and

hip hop

concert tour called music inspires

health in 2008.

we organized concerts in atlanta

washington d.c

new york boston chicago and los angeles

included a variety of rock and hip-hop

musicians

including rock singer ingrid michelson

and hip hop

artist trey songz our project gradually

gained the momentum of passionate public

health leaders and they supported us to

create a campaign

that had an edge a youthfulness to it

and something that would be

entertaining for our target audience our

concerts reach up to

300 people and the public health leaders

liked our project because they had

an independent voice that was not

impeded by politics

tip number two do your formative

research

so our campaign worked because we were

able to identify

what health topics our target audience

actually wanted to learn about

and we presented it in a way that

they would want to actually watch so

early on in this project

i gained advice from one of my mentors

who was a leader at the coca-cola

company who one day told me

ben don’t just throw ideas at a wall

hoping they’ll stick

do your formative research so we thought

about different ways that we could do

this

we decided to have a national online

survey

and we also went to college campuses to

do both focus groups

and paper surveys we use paper surveys

for the students that were

in such a hurry that they couldn’t sit

down for the focus groups

and this was valuable information

because it helped us fine tune

and beta test several different parts of

our project including the health

education short films that we were

producing with young directors in

hollywood it also helped us

to choose a logo and during the focus

groups we were

able to brainstorm and also select a

tagline

which was rock hard live long

so during this time period it was in the

mid 2000s when we were

building this campaign public schools in

america could only teach

about abstinence-only sex education and

in our focus groups it was really

interesting because the students

told us several things one people were

still having sex

and they’re having lots of unprotected

sex and they told us that

abstinence-only education wasn’t

practical

also they told us that they and their

peers were engaging

in a lot more oral sex because of this

education because they deemed it as a

safe behavior

yet most public schools weren’t teaching

them about the different stds that could

be acquired through oral sex

and so they asked us through our

programming to try to educate

their peers about this particular topic

and so the formative research was really

important because it

re-addressed and focused what

actually needed to be taught about

through our campaign

tip number three teach by breaking down

barriers this is something that music

does

better than almost anything else for

example in the 1927 film

the jazz singer starring al jolson

the main character uses jazz music as a

bridge between

african americans american jews and

mainstream white america and in the most

mesmerizing scene

al jolson sings to his mom irving

berlin’s

blue skies while talking with his mom

about his thoughts about assimilation

intermarriage and this was a very

historical

moment in motion pictures because

when he was talking this is the first

time that sound was ever recorded in a

movie

and while he was singing this was the

first time that music was ever played in

a movie and he broke down barriers and

similarly

in our campaign hip-hop’s artist trey

songz performed in our concert in los

angeles a song called store run that was

really popular he had written

and it describes him making out with his

girlfriend them about to have sex

stopping what they’re doing because he

realizes he doesn’t have any condoms

going to the store buying a package of

condoms and then coming back

and during our concert trey songz threw

out hundreds of condoms

to his fans and this was a really

powerful message

he was emotionally passionate and it

came across as extremely authentic and i

encourage you when you build your health

education campaigns

to think about ways that you can break

down barriers with it

tip number four mentor your celebrities

so while we were preparing for each of

the concerts we worked with the

musicians

in advance to help them become

comfortable

addressing a particular health issue

that they feel passionate about to the

audience

our health topics range from hiv std

prevention

to obesity prevention exercise

nutrition depression awareness and

eating disorders

and a week prior to every concert we

emailed each artist

a fact sheet of data-driven information

that talked about the particular health

topic that they had chosen to present

about as well as all the health topics

they were talking about in the tour one

rock singer ben queller got so into our

project on the day of the concert he

asked me if it would be possible for him

to talk about the other health topics

during

other portions of his concert and he did

a fabulous job and this just drives home

the point

that it’s really important to work in

advance to help whatever celebrity

spokesperson you have

feel very comfortable and confident to

present health information

so tip number five it’s really important

to empower your audience your goal

should be to motivate and empower the

public

to change behavior so let me give you an

example of why this is important

say one of my patients comes to me who’s

a smoker

and i have a conversation trying to get

my patient to quit smoking

in clinic now i’m not likely to convince

her

in one conversation usually for patients

to quit smoking you have to talk with

them in different ways over a long

period of time

similarly we realized this for our

health education campaign that we

couldn’t change behavior just by having

a concert

so we intentionally tried to use

different

forms of social media in order to reach

adolescents

college students and young adults over a

long period of time

first of all we built a multimedia based

health education website

that used flash animation and music and

we were one of the first flash animation

websites ever created

we also went to hollywood got the help

of young directors to film health

education short films with a grant from

panavision

in addition to that we got the help of

some amazing graphic

artists in order to design a national

poster campaign that was used on college

campuses

throughout the country we also worked

with

comcast cable to film an hiv

prevention psa that they generously

donated air time

in the atlanta metropolitan area for

several weeks before our concert

we also got the help of kaiser

permanente to build

engaging and entertaining health

education programming in the lobby of

the concerts that they were sponsoring

at each of those concerts and at the

actual concerts

we not only had the musicians talking to

the audience about their health topics

we also showed health education short

films that we had already produced

so again we didn’t just have a one-off

event we taught them

about health in several different ways

tip number six is really important to

research outcomes and this is important

for two reasons

first of all if you’re going to have

another campaign again

you need to be able to fundraise and you

need to be able to

show that your campaign actually works

so

when you apply for grants and you ask

people for

donations you need to be able to

demonstrate

that you were able to change behaviors

through your campaign

in addition to that if you’re going to

have a campaign again

and you try to get a bigger celebrity

they’re also going to want to know that

your campaign works because music

celebrities

will only lend their name to campaigns

that they can trust

so we did this in a number of ways at

our

national health education concert tour

we had surveys both before the concert

and we

got everyone’s email addresses that

wanted to participate

and we had follow-up surveys asking a

ton of different questions

so we were able to demonstrate a

significant increase of consistent

condom use

at one month six months and 12 months

following our campaign and we were able

to present a ton of data

at different national medical meetings

and also we received an award from the

cdc

at their 2009 national hiv prevention

conference so fast forward to today

we’re in the middle of this covet 19

pandemic i’m a gastroenterologist

at two hospitals in chicago i also work

at a refugee clinic

and i work at a rehabilitation hospital

here in chicago

i’m taking care of lots of covenant 19

patients including doing procedures in

some of the covet 19 patients

fortunately we have these papr machines

that are like spacesuits that pump in

air

around our heads while we’re wearing an

n95 mask to keep us

really safe so

i was talking to a bunch of nurses and

doctors not only at my hospital but

friends nationally

and early on i realized that medical

workers on the front lines were going

really frustrated that the public wasn’t

taking this seriously enough

so i thought of the idea over a course

of a day

why not build a new

health education campaign using music to

teach about covid19 prevention i came up

with the idea of concerts and cocktails

where we team up musicians with nurses

and doctors on the front lines

and it’s been great we have a concert

online a virtual concert every saturday

and the nurses and doctors record psas

and teach

the public about wearing masks properly

including covering your nose

and your mouth and encouraging

physically

distancing even several months after the

initial cases were happening in america

and each week we’ve gotten bigger and

bigger it’s been amazing because

we literally built a national health

education campaign in one week using the

six

tips that i just outlined for you today

so queen’s three-hour concert in 1992

dramatically changed the way the public

thinks about building health education

campaigns

and hiv prevention in particular they

made

hiv prevention cool and they entertain

the world

with an emotional passion that was

authentic

through music inspires health and the

concerts and cocktail series we have

adapted

queen’s methodology in order to create

new health education campaigns and i

want to leave you with one final thought

in order to build a successful health

education campaign

you need to combine the right ratio of

entertainment

with powerful health education messages

that are delivered

in a non-judgmental way rock hard

live long and stay safe

and now i would like to play the

beginning of foray’s elegy

for all of the patients worldwide

who have died of covid19 over the past

few months

and their families who are in mourning

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uh

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so

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you