Health Literacy via Media Literacy

Abstract

Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA) builds on the innate comfort that children and adolescents have with audiovisual media to give them control of an important information stream about their own health and well-being. Clinicians provide video camcorders to young people who have chronic medical conditions and ask them to teach the clinicians about their experiences and needs by making visual illness narratives. Their visual narratives are unexpected, insightful, and extremely useful for developing a reality-based clinician-patient partnership in health. VIA visual narratives function as important research, education, policy-making, and advocacy tools to deliver more realistic, more humane, and ultimately more effective medical care. Most important, by providing key information about the context in which they live with illness, young patients can attain a position of equal authority in the inherently unbalanced clinician-patient power differential.