For most health organizations, being able to communicate effectively with the public is a top priority. Whether the cause is preventing obesity, raising awareness about the uninsured, or encouraging cancer screening, communicating health information is a vital part of the effort.

Often a group’s communications strategy includes making use of television—whether through putting out press releases they hope will be covered in the news, creating public service ads (PSAs), or, increasingly, by working with popular TV shows to embed health information in the storylines of dramas, reality shows, soap operas, or sitcoms—a type of “product placement” for health information. As a communications tool, TV continues to dominate, primarily because the size of its audience is unrivaled, dwarfing that of even the most popular websites.

But hard evidence about the impact of so-called “edu-tainment” is hard to come by, and opportunities for large-scale, nationally representative evaluations of health messages in TV shows are rare.

The Study
The study reported on here was the result of a unique opportunity to place a health storyline in one of the top-rated shows on television. Since its launch in 2005, Grey’s Anatomy has been at or near the top of the Nielsen ratings, a cultural phenomenon that routinely draws an audience in the range of 20 million viewers. While the show focuses primarily on the personal lives of a group of young doctors at the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital, each episode also includes an abundance of medical situations encountered by the hospital’s staff.

There are a multitude of opportunities for communicating health information to the public—whether as part
of a conscious effort at education, or incidentally, as part of a naturally occurring storyline. ...

Visit Television as a Health Educator: A Case Study of Grey’s Anatomy Download Page

A Kaiser Family Foundation Report
September 2008

by Victoria Rideout, MA
Kaiser Family Foundation

Download Television as a Health Educator: A Case Study of Grey’s Anatomy

PDF format, 828KB, 36Pages.

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
3 Results
11 Methodology
12 the script
15 Tables
19 Combined Topline Results

Visit Kaiser Family Foundation Website

A leader in health policy and communications, the Kaiser Family Foundation is a non-profit, private operating foundation focusing on the major health care issues facing the U.S., with a growing role in global health. Unlike grant-making foundations, Kaiser develops and runs its own research and communications programs, sometimes in partnership with other non-profit research organizations or major media companies.

We serve as a non-partisan source of facts, information, and analysis for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the public. Our product is information, always provided free of charge – from the most sophisticated policy research, to basic facts and numbers, to information young people can use to improve their health or elderly people can use to understand their Medicare benefits.

The Kaiser Family Foundation is not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries.

Comments (0)

Name

Email

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment