How To Create A Short Video of Your Healthcare Experiences

Published by Beth Campbell Duke on June 23, 2024June 23, 2024

Have you ever thought you could (or should!) create a short video about your experiences navigating our healthcare systems?

It might be time. When many of us speak, we can create more impact. Together, our experiences are powerful!

What is ‘Short’?

Short videos for sharing on social media are about 2 minutes in length.

If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation, it will take me a week to prepare. If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now.

Winston Churchill

When you create a short video, there will be some preparation involved because our experiences in the healthcare system are complex, and narrowing an experience down requires some thought.

Consider:

• We speak at a rate of ~150 words/minute. That means a short video is limited to ~300 words. 
• This means having a script! (It won’t take you 3 weeks!)

Why Create a Short Video of Your Healthcare Experiences?

There are a few reasons to consider creating a short video of your healthcare experience:

• The writing and editing process can help you work through a difficult experience.
• Your story can help others better understand what patients and care partners experience.
• You can help others learn about actions they can take to better navigate a potential issue themselves.

A Few Words of Caution

It’s important to think about the main topic/event you wish to share because there are potential impacts for you. Discussing your medical issues and healthcare experiences is personal. Depending on the situation, you may not be ready to even put words to paper, let alone tell your story publicly.

You will want to consider the format of your story and where it will be published. The information here is about making a short video – consider that you can remain anonymous by making an audio instead, or by having slides or images in a video instead of your own face.

The benefit of a short video is that you are telling a portion of your story in an overview. Your initial writing may get into the weeds, but by the time you’ve done the editing and rewriting you will have a good balance of your own experiences and why they’re important to others.

You can always use the parts you edit out in another video.

How to Create a Short Video

Think about the main topic or experience you want to share in the 2 minute video. We can’t tell our full stories in 2 minutes, but the short story we tell can have an impact. One short video will highlight an aspect of our story in a way that others will engage with.

General Steps for Creating Your Short Video

Creating a video has a number of steps:

1. Write a script. This is imperative when doing a 2 minute video because there’s no time for going off-script, especially when you can speak about your patient experiences for hours! Think about the structure of the piece. In general, there are 4 main aspects to cover:
   1. Introduce yourself briefly (~50 words).
   2. What is the topic you’re speaking about (~100 words)?
   3. Why is it important (~100 words)?
   4. How has it impacted you (~50 words)? How can others learn from this? What is the call to action?
2. Record your video. There are many options for recording video. I use my phone and a free teleprompter app that scrolls the script while I’m recording. There are a number of ways to record your video, and all have different pros and cons.

3. Edit your video. Editing is usually limited to removing the sections at the beginning, end and where you’ve made an error and restarted.
   • I transfer the video from my phone to my laptop for editing by moving it to my Google Drive (it’s too large a file to email) and then adding it o my video editing software. I use iMovie on my MacBook laptop, and there are other free editing options for other operating systems.
   • Edit the video so it is as close to the script as possible for the next step.
4. Upload the video. You need a place to host the video online and most people use YouTube. If you’ve kept tightly to the script, you can easily use the text for captioning the video. You can also edit the captioning text here so it matches what you actually said in the video.
5. Share, share, share! Your short video is suitable for a variety of social media platforms.

Get Help To Create Your Video

A ‘Create Your Healthcare Video’ workshop will be about 2 hours in length and you will leave with a script written and ready to record. Interested? I’m open to running the workshop if/when there’s a minimum of 3 participants. Fire me an email – Beth (at) NavigatingHealthcare (dot) ca.