Guest posting by Kylie Balotin
In my Medical Media Arts Lab course, I have been assigned to a team in order to design a campaign that will encourage primary care physicians in the Harris County Public Health System to offer HIV testing to their patients more regularly. As the semester has progressed, we have come up with a few solutions to our problem including designing a poster to put in every patient examination room. We hope that this poster will act as an icebreaker to stimulate a dialogue between the physician and patient and as a reminder for the physician. Currently, we are beginning to think about what this poster could potentially look like.
I began by looking up past and current HIV poster campaigns, but I noticed that most of these campaigns were focused on the patient rather than the physician. While posters like the one below give examples of what information is usually displayed and interesting examples of how to display information, I’m not sure if these posters are completely what we want. These posters might be interesting to patients, but I don’t think they’ll be enough to catch a physician’s attention and, even further, change their behavior. This poster is interesting to look at initially, but I don’t think it would catch the physician’s attention after the first time he or she sees it. It might blend in with the other posters and even into the walls. This is called “campaign fatigue.” This campaign will not be effective if the physician forgets about the poster after seeing it a couple of times.
(“We Can Stop HIV – One Conversation at a Time”)
As a result, I began to look up health campaigns that sought to change physician behavior. I became especially interested in an antismoking campaign in New York called “Don’t’ Be Silent About Smoking.” This campaign has many of the same ideas as our campaign including opening a dialogue between a physician and his patient about a preventable health issue. I was especially interested in the images that the campaign used for some of its posters and think that these would be interesting to implement in our campaign.
The 2008 Media Campaign Posters (“Media Campaign”)
The first version of the “Don’t Be Silent About Smoking” poster that came out in 2008 featured a physician with his or her mouth sewn shut of taped over (shown below). I like how provocative this poster is; it is really shocking to look at when you see it for the first time. If we chose to go with a poster design that is similar to this one, even if the physician gets used to seeing the poster, the patient will probably ask about it. I also really like the text that was included in the poster. It doesn’t state facts or statistics about smoking and deaths caused by diseases related smoking. Instead, the posters emphasize the physician-patient relationship and how patients look to their physicians for health advice. This design is also interesting because we want to get the physicians at the Harris County Public Health system involved with the campaign too. We want to try to feature a physician on our posters, and a design like this one would allow us to do just that.
One of the biggest challenges that we foresee to a successful poster campaign is campaign fatigue. We are worried that the physician will forget about our poster after a couple of weeks, and we are trying to find a design that will delay this from occurring. A provocative poster such as the ones above could possibly be a solution to our problem.
References
“Media Campaign.” Don’t Be Silent About Smoking. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2015. <http://talktoyourpatients.org/media/2010.php>.
“We Can Stop HIV – One Conversation at a Time.” We Can Stop HIV – One Conversation at a Time. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.