A major goal of our team is to communicate with a very wide audience about the challenges of recognizing pain in people who have dementia and limited ability to communicate. As we began our journey toward increasing awareness about underrecognized pain in people with Alzheimer’s Disease and related conditions, we quickly realized that there was very little that had been written about this for a lay audience. Scientific articles were available but used technical jargon and were often inaccessible to the general public, hidden behind paywalls.
Our goal was to mobilize knowledge (including available solutions) widely and straight into the hands of the people who need it the most (i.e., families, patients, and health care workers). We started our knowledge mobilization effort in 2019 by developing an engaging and easy to relate 2-minute video that allows audiences to hear about the problem from a patient-perspective. We wrote the video script carefully and showed it to stakeholders who gave us input. These stakeholders were caregivers of people with dementia, health care staff and members of organizations focusing on aging and/or dementia. We incorporated their feedback into the final product.
The #SeePainMoreClearly video, summarizes some of the most important aspects of the evidence base about pain in dementia and has been watched well over 100,000 times by people from around the world. Feedback from the audiences has been extremely favourable
“Powerful video to show front line staff in long-term care homes and physicians”
“I hadn’t thought about this issue until I saw the video”
“Great video! Very informative and easy to understand”.
Viewers have also told us that they found the video to be emotionally moving. How You Can Help?
Would you like to share your thoughts on our See Pain More Clearly campaign and the use of social media to mobilize knowledge about pain in dementia?
We are looking for policymakers, researchers, healthcare workers and family caregivers to participate in a study to evaluate the effectiveness of the #SeePainMoreClearly social media initiative to mobilize knowledge about pain in dementia.