COMMUNITY OUTREACH

EXERCISE
The US Health Crisis

Kathy Nguyen, Rhonda Osman & Lauren Witty

03.09.2021
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INTRODUCTION
The rationale behind our Instagram posts and stories was to create an engaging way for
people to learn about COVID-19, specifically how it has impacted health outcomes and social
determinants of health. Our project took place over the course of 6 days, and we chose our topics
to be maternal mortality, opioid abuse, homicides, the U.S. healthcare system, income inequality,
and medical racism. We made daily Instagram stories on our personal accounts featuring poll
questions that allowed us to test our audience on their knowledge of each day’s specific topic,
and promote our joint account (@uwph_covidhealthstats) for more information. The posts and
stories on our joint account allowed us to present follow-up data and statistics on the topics.
Through our individual stories we targeted our personal networks, mainly consisting of
college students. With our joint Instagram account, we were able to reach out to public health or
healthcare focused organizations at UW to reach their audience of college students that are
outside of our own networks. This means that the majority of our audience was college-aged
students in the Seattle area.
Our main goal with this project was to engage with a wide audience each day and to
educate them about how COVID is a syndemic, rather than just a pandemic. With each of our
topics, we aimed to explain how COVID has been exacerbating the issues and inequalities that
already existed within our healthcare system, and then provide information as to how we can
move forward to overcome these barriers based on what we have learned in lecture. The main
takeaway that we hoped our audience would have is that to improve health in America, we
would need to take a collective approach to fix the root causes of bad health, rather than
continuing with our individualistic approach to health.

METHODS
During the course of this project, our group followed the plan that we outlined in our
proposal. We began our project by researching the six health-related topics that we wanted to
share information about: maternal mortality, opioid abuse, homicide rates, the U.S. healthcare
system, income inequality, and medical racism. We then split our research into information that
would be shared on Instagram polls or Instagram posts. Once we had gathered the information
and created our graphics, we began to post this information.
Originally, we had planned to post a “test poll” to see if we could gather enough
responses from our shared Instagram account that was made for this class. However, we realized
that we had not gathered a big enough following to get the desired amount of responses if we
solely used our shared account, so we decided to skip the test poll and utilize our personal
accounts.

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 We then began our posting schedule on Sunday, February 28th and continued until
Saturday, March 6th. At 5 PM each day, we would post a series of polls that would challenge our
followers to test their knowledge on the health topic for that day. After 24 hours, we would then
post a “follow-up” post that would show how they responded to the questions, the answers to the
polls, and additional information about how that topic is related to health. This involved us
gathering the data from the poll questions, identifying what questions were difficult, and
tailoring our post to inform viewers about health in the US. Additionally, we would add a graphic
to the follow-up post that would explain possible solutions to these health issues, giving viewers
an avenue to pursue change (Appendices 1 through 6).
Once the follow-up posts were shared, we started reaching out to local organizations,
departments and clubs to see if they would share our posts. We did this by reaching out via
messaging on Instagram and simply asking groups to repost or share our information. When
organizations were able to repost our “follow-up” posts, we saw a great uptick in the number of
likes, showing that we were reaching a broader network.

RESULTS
During this project, we were able to engage a fairly large audience. Since each of us were
posting these questions and follow-up posts on our personal accounts, we mostly interacted with
our personal networks. However, when other clubs or organizations reposted our information, we
were also able to educate people outside of our networks. We were unable to measure the
responses of those from outside organizations, yet we were able to see some people outside of
our networks interacting with our follow-up posts, showing that there was a positive response.
On the first day of our project, we received overwhelming support, as we greatly
surpassed our goal of getting 250 respondents per poll. However, as the project progressed
through the week, participation in the polls began to fall, and we averaged around 170
respondents per poll. However, 170 respondents is close to our goal and serves as a good sample
size. Therefore, even though we did not quite reach as many people as we thought we would, we
were able to educate a good number of our personal networks.
Additionally, we had hoped that 5 organizations would repost our follow-up posts. We
were able to achieve this goal, as other UW clubs and organizations were willing to share our
information with their members and followers. This was a success, as it helped us to reach
outside of our personal networks.
Overall, our project was a success. We were able to engage a large number of people both
in and out of our personal networks. This allowed us to learn more about what others think about
health and challenged us to teach them about different inequities that exist in the US. Through
this project, we learnt that there are a lot of misconceptions about health in the US. Occasionally,
we would get messages from people expressing surprise or astonishment over some of our facts.
We were also able to record the breadth of these misconceptions by gathering data on each

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question. We compiled this data into a series of pie charts, which allowed us to visualize what
people think about health in the US (Appendices 1 through 6). This information allowed us to
learn and understand what misconceptions exist and how they may have prevented legislation
that would change US health outcomes from being passed.
The whole point of our follow-up posts was to address the misconceptions about health in
the US and provide ideas of solutions for how we can address these disparities. Each of the six
topics included one post about next steps, which provided viewers with some ideas of how we
can go about improving health. In addition to this, we listed our sources on each of the posts,
which allowed interested viewers to go and explore more about the topic. Both of these strategies
gave viewers the tools to explore this information more and make actionable change in the US.

Peer-Student Participation Statement

Kathy, Lauren, Rhonda conceived and planned the project. All student authors researched
selected topics and gathered information pertinent to meeting our four main goals. Kathy
organized and split research information into instagram polls/stories and instagram posts.
Rhonda designed the instagram polls/stories for our personal accounts. Lauren gathered all the
post-instagram poll information and created infographics to post on the main instagram. Rhonda
contacted public health organizations requesting to repost the infographics created by Lauren. All
student authors provided critical feedback and helped shape the outreach, analysis and report.

CRITIQUES
As with our first projects, we were restrained in capacity due to the duration of this assignment
and our busy schedules as working students. There are so many additional components that we
would have liked to have included to tie in our project altogether, and heighten the influence of
our outreach campaign, especially given our passion for these topics.
First of all, we would have liked to broaden our audience. This means gathering feedback
from outside our own networks, since our respondent group mostly comprises college students
from UW-Seattle, many of which are interested in pursuing the healthcare field. It would have
been interesting to outreach to bigger public health organizations outside of our regions, and
identify the big misconceptions at those locations. In addition, if we had more time, we should
find a more clear way to increase how many people were able to read and engage with our
instagram posts, since we found low engagement numbers with the public instagram page, but
our personal instagrams fortunately had a decent amount.
Pursuing further, we would also like to improve the delivery of our information. One big
aspect we could change is to incorporate more context prior to quizzing our network. Some poll
questions were presented without any background information to prime our audience for more
critical/potentially controversial topics. Also, we noticed a reduction of engagement throughout

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the week. With more capacity we would have liked to add more variability in poll and
information delivery. As Lauren had mentioned, we received about 300 poll engagements on the
first day, but the last day yielded half of that amount. It would also be amazing if we had the
capacity to find methods to go more in-depth with the material, since for our project, we only
delivered highlights for each topic. This could be through a continuous campaign, introducing
topics each week, or so. There are SO many factors that contribute to the syndemic concept that
we want to highlight, so having a more sustainable regular distribution of information may be
able to cover more of the topics that we wanted to cover.
Overall, regardless of the outcome, this project has reinforced to us that we should
continually be thinking critically of the information presented to us, and view all of this
information through an interdisciplinary lens, so our community efforts are well-thought out and
supported.

KEY LEARNINGS
There was a lot that we learned for this outreach, especially since we had much different
ideas in contrast to our first attempts at outreach. From our polls, we found that many of those in
our networks were able to identify that the U.S. is currently lacking in health outcomes, which
might have been a lasting effect of our first COE projects. Also from our polls, we discovered
that the gap in knowledge may be in understanding the upstream factors impacting these health
outcomes, and its potential solutions. This was where we had to be flexible with our information
research and change the information that we delivered based off of how our polls yielded.
Another big key is learning that it is difficult to portray the difference between health and
healthcare. We really needed to emphasize the idea that yes, we could improve our healthcare
system, but the more important, critical point is to address our social programs/policies, and we
did not have a whole course worth of time to be able to nail this point to our audience, so we did
the best we could to get this point across by making our graphics engaging and information
delivery not too complicated.
On the same note, we found challenge in delivering information that is both palatable and
engaging. Especially amongst the infodemic that is going on, it is hard to surface your
research-backed information above all others that are being distributed. Therefore, we had to go
through multiple stages of refining our research and rewording it and visualizing it into ways
where people would be able to engage with the information.
Finally, we found that debunking information is a fun way to cater your information
dissemination. Since we aimed to identify misconceptions with our polls, we were able to change
our informational posts according to what our networks were misunderstanding. This means that
we had to be quite flexible in our delivery and research, and put more effort into that. Given this,
we do recognize our privilege as university students, and given this position, we also recognize
the importance of using this power to deliver accurate information to our communities.

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APPENDIX 1

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APPENDIX 2

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APPENDIX 3

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APPENDIX 4

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APPENDIX 5

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APPENDIX 6

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