Television As A Health Educator

The Kaiser Family Foundation has released a report on the use of popular television programs to provide health education. In the study, the foundation collaborated with the writer's of Grey's Anatomy to develop a plot line containing a specific health education topic. This study documents the enormous potential of popular entertainment television to serve as a health educator—even on a show that has a “soap-opera”-like feel and a comedic bent. A very large proportion of viewers absorbed the information that was provided in Grey’s Anatomy, and many of them had retained that knowledge six weeks later. On the key fact presented in the show—that an HIV-positive pregnant woman who gets the proper treatment has more than a 90% chance of having a healthy baby—the proportion of viewers who were aware of that fact quadrupled, from 15% before the show to 61% after it aired, an increase of 46 percentage points. The full report