Medical Awareness Team – Turkey (TurkMSIC)

Name of the activity: Medical Awareness Team

Country/NMO: Turkey (TurkMSIC)

Program: Health Systems

Contact information: [email protected]

Type of the activity: Education

General description:

Medical Awareness Team created it’s first work with a video of HIV/AIDS awaness but for hearing impaired people. There were many videos about HIV/AIDS but there was none for vulnerable groups. So the aim of this project is to create a source for vulnerable groups who mostly have special conditions. We preferred to record video because literacy is blocking the way of health literacy and even the health literacy in our country is not well developed. There is so much conflicts in medical information in the media. The people are confused with the infollution. As medical students the public trust us and we should fix the wrong ideas to raise the true awareness in medical fields. We prepared some videos and got beautiful feedbacks that motivated us to do this in routine. Since then we continue to record more videos and print more brochures about every topic we care about in medicine.

Focus area:

Medicine related issues

Problem statement:

It is globally known that preventing an illness is much less burden to the patient/doctor/govenment in every ways. This is the core meaning of public health philosophy. Health literacy is one of the main components of creating awareness. Unfortunately illiteracy is as much as 10% in some Turkish cities and health literacy is precisely low in Turkey. Additionally there is so much misleading information. As medical students it is our duty to raise awareness in medical issues. More importantly vulnerable groups need this support even more than others. Considering the technology and internet dominancy in our daily word we strongly believe that visual materials work more than verbal actions. This situation encouraged us to start a youtube channel that aims to upload videos that raise awaness in health and medical problems.

Target groups and beneficiaries:

The target group is the public and mostly vulnerable groups as the deaf, pregnant women etc. Any video that aims to raise awareness will increase the protection based behaviours and decrease the burden in health in many ways.

Objectives and indicators of success:

Raise awareness in medical issues
Raise awareness of public health
Raise awareness of vulnerable groups
Promote protection from diseases
Acting against obesity, diabetes, aids, inequality in health
Raising awareness in children and mother health
Encouraging medical students in advocacy
Encouragin medical students to gain skills in national public health problems

Methodology:

Filmin one brief youtube video with a medical theme each month
Preparing one brochure related to that video each month

Ex.: AIDS and HIV awareness video in sign language
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecZq31Hfr4g&t=153s

Plans for evaluation:

We evaluate our work from our feedbcaks as comments on the video. Our first video was shared by a national radio channel and was tweeted by some locally famous people. We recieved many thankful messages from hearing impaired people. This is the only evaluation we can do, we can not measure the outcomes as the change in health in public with this because we are just a minor element of this act of public health.