AAP, ASBH and APHA oh my!!
Hi all! It's been a very busy few weeks!! Gary and I just back from a whirlwind of 3 different conferences! We had an exhibit booth at the American Academy of Pediatrics Conference in DC, conducted a workshop at the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Conference in Houston and had an exhibit booth, gave a talk, and received an award (the trifecta!) at the American Public Health Association Conference in Chicago. We had the opportunity to share our work and met sooo many great people along the way! Things started with the American Academy of Pediatrics Conference in Washington, DC. At the AAP, we had a booth in the exhibit hall to share our stuff!!
The most exciting part of the AAP conference, was that we got to debut 2 new comics!! First off, we have a NEW edition of our Iggy and the Inhalers comic! Earlier this year, we shared our comic at the Association of Asthma Educators Conference in California. We had been planning on making a new edition of the comic, but before we did, we asked for feedback from the Asthma Educators and experts in the field about our comic book. They gave some very insightful feedback and made several tweaks/changes to the Iggy comic book! Updates include a new double sized asthma action plan that can be torn out of the comic, updated inhaler/spacer instructions, tweaks to some of the phrasing and wording (using the most current language used by asthma education specialists), as well as a glossary and quiz at the end of the book! You can flip through the new pages on our website- http://iggyandtheinhalers.com/
Next! We got to debut our (initial prototype version) of our Pain Comic that we made with Emergency physician Amy Drendel, studies pain management and pain assessment in pediatric patients. We also had Stop Light Pain Scale cards. Once we finished the comic, we had them shipped directly to DC, and that was the first time we'd seen them in print!
Gary and I had an amazing time at the American Academy of Pediatrics conference. I got to catch up with my old pediatrics co-residents and hear about the interesting things they are doing all over the country. At our booth, we met so many great health care providers, physicians, nurses, students who were interested in how we uses comics and videos to teach, and had so many great ideas on educational materials for other healthcare topics!
The same weekend as the AAP conference, we also had another conference! So Gary left me in DC and headed to Houston for the ASBH conference! At the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Conference, Gary presented a workshop with Ben Wilfond MD of the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics and Stephanie Alessi, JD from Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. Together, we shared the lessons-leaning from our collaborations in different projects on creating whiteboard videos for research using focus groups and surveys. We explained how some metaphors worked (gumball machine) and some didn't (referees). Then, we had workshop participants draw their own storyboards!! They came up with great ideas (for example: using a fictitious disease as a stand-in for talking about the disease outbreaks). After nearly getting rained in from the remnants of Hurricane Patricia, Gary made it back to DC for the end of the AAP conference! Whew!
About a week later, Gary met me in Chicago for the American Public Health Association conference! This was a huge conference, and the Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA the 19th United States Surgeon General was one of the keynote speakers! Gary and I had a few great things to do at the APHA conference. For starters, we were invited by the American Public Health association to participate in the "Art@TheExpo" exhibit. We decided to use our booth to create a gallery showcasing some great examples of comics being used for health promotion and health education!
Her are a few examples of the artwork that we featured at the APHA Art@TheExpo exhibit. Our goal was to share with the attendees at the American Public Health Association the amazing ability comics have to communicate complex scientific and health information to help empower people to better understand their own health issues. Thanks to our involvement in the Comics and Medicine Conferences, we realized that within the broad topic of graphic medicine, there were a lot of people using comics for the more specific application as health education. What's great about the below examples is the wonderful diversity in topics and audiences as well as the backgrounds each creator is coming from. This great work shows that there really is no limit to the type of health topic you could teach using comics!
Beyond our Art@theExpo booth, Gary and I also had a few other things we were busy with at the APHA conference!
We were super excited to find out that "Iggy and the Inhalers" won in the multimedia category for the APHA Public Health Education and Promotion Health Materials Contest!!
First, we were invite to give a talk on our project on a panel along with the other winners!
It was great hearing about the insanely cool projects the other presenters on our panel were up to! They next day, we were invited to the APHA PHEHP awards luncheon, where we were presented with our award for Iggy!
...aaaand here's the photo the APHA PHEHP took! They even posted it on their facebook page!
Embarrassing typos aside, these past few weeks have been super exciting for Gary and I. We met so many interesting people doing truly innovative things to educate and entertain healthcare audiences. We were truly inspired and made friends who we can hopefully collaborate with in the future! It was also really an honor to get this recognition for our "Iggy and the Inhalers" project. It's crazy to think that just a few years ago, I was frantically making copies of the black and white Iggy comic at Kinko's and gluing each individual trading card together(!!). We've come along way baby! While it's been a great year, we even more excited for the new projects ahead. 2016 it gonna be even better! We can't wait to share with you what's next for Booster Sh*t Media!!
Till then, thanks for reading!!
Your pal,
Alex
