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
[Music]
so
[Music]
um
[Music]
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
[Music]
uh
[Music]
so
[Music]
you