Have you ever wondered how the power of storytelling can transform healthcare? This episode hosted by Mike Lang offers a captivating exposition on the profound influence of digital narratives, featuring the trailblazing minds of Patient Voices UK's Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner, as well as Laura Mazzoli Smith of the University of Durham. Together, we navigate the evolution of digital storytelling in medicine, from its humble technological beginnings to the therapeutic art form that now shapes healthcare education and patient care.
Our guests share enthralling insights into the meticulous craft of digital stories and their ability to foster connection and community within the healthcare sector. The conversation illuminates technical challenges, the importance of preserving storytellers' authenticity, and the role of external recognition like the British Medical Journal Award in solidifying the value of this medium. We also discuss the exciting future of digital storytelling, exemplified by the upcoming We, The Story Festival in Zakynthos, Greece and the launch of Durham's Narrative Practices Lab—a beacon for expanding the dialogue on narrative's scale, ethics, and impact in healthcare.
Wrapping up the discussion, we delve into the tangible changes ignited by narrative practices, from inspiring the Royal College of Nursing's curriculum revolution to reshaping doctors' perspectives on patient consultations. The episode also brings to light the expansion of storytelling facilitator training in East Africa, the "Caregivers in the Wild" docuseries, and the influence of storytelling in African communities. Join us for this celebration of storytelling's remarkable power to change lives and strengthen the very fabric of healthcare communities.
Other Links Mentioned
About Our Guests
About Leading Through Stories
Everyone has a story to tell—and what we do with that story can create lasting impact. Every episode, Leading Through Stories, helps unravel the how and why of digital storytelling with host Kristy Wolfe.
Life is made up of meaningful moments—which ones do you want to share?
This podcast is presented by Common Language DST, digital storytelling facilitation training for health and wellness changemakers.
Don't miss an episode from Leading Through Stories!
Sign up for the Leading Through Stories newsletter, follow us on Instagram @LeadingThroughStories and subscribe on your favourite podcast platform.
Have you ever wondered how the power of storytelling can transform healthcare? This episode hosted by Mike Lang offers a captivating exposition on the profound influence of digital narratives, featuring the trailblazing minds of Patient Voices UK's Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner, as well as Laura Mazzoli Smith of the University of Durham. Together, we navigate the evolution of digital storytelling in medicine, from its humble technological beginnings to the therapeutic art form that now shapes healthcare education and patient care.
Our guests share enthralling insights into the meticulous craft of digital stories and their ability to foster connection and community within the healthcare sector. The conversation illuminates technical challenges, the importance of preserving storytellers' authenticity, and the role of external recognition like the British Medical Journal Award in solidifying the value of this medium. We also discuss the exciting future of digital storytelling, exemplified by the upcoming We, The Story Festival in Zakynthos, Greece and the launch of Durham's Narrative Practices Lab—a beacon for expanding the dialogue on narrative's scale, ethics, and impact in healthcare.
Wrapping up the discussion, we delve into the tangible changes ignited by narrative practices, from inspiring the Royal College of Nursing's curriculum revolution to reshaping doctors' perspectives on patient consultations. The episode also brings to light the expansion of storytelling facilitator training in East Africa, the "Caregivers in the Wild" docuseries, and the influence of storytelling in African communities. Join us for this celebration of storytelling's remarkable power to change lives and strengthen the very fabric of healthcare communities.
Other Links Mentioned
About Our Guests
About Leading Through Stories
Everyone has a story to tell—and what we do with that story can create lasting impact. Every episode, Leading Through Stories, helps unravel the how and why of digital storytelling with host Kristy Wolfe.
Life is made up of meaningful moments—which ones do you want to share?
This podcast is presented by Common Language DST, digital storytelling facilitation training for health and wellness changemakers.
Don't miss an episode from Leading Through Stories!
Sign up for the Leading Through Stories newsletter, follow us on Instagram @LeadingThroughStories and subscribe on your favourite podcast platform.
You pick up all sorts of things from the people you're working with because it's such a plus proximity, so you have to keep yourself safe, so you can make them safe and make the stories safe as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know that's a big part of what the collective is all about is we have this community of practice where we can help keep each other safe right, and I love the connection between when we keep each other safe, we're allowed to open up spaces like that for others. It enables us to do that in a more profound and compelling way, so I love that.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Leading Through Stories, a podcast that explores the how and why of digital storytelling. My name is Kristi Wolff, and each episode I connect with storytellers or common language digital storytelling facilitators to learn more about the health and wellness stories they are creating and sharing. Life is made up of meaningful moments. Which ones do you want to share? Hi friends, this is a really exciting episode of Leading Through Stories. It was actually recorded in November during the kitchen table nights session. Kitchen table nights happens four times a year. Anyone is invited.
Speaker 3:We screen a number of digital stories, so Mike Lang hoaxed it with the common language team. In this case, we had guests from the UK, and the guests that were involved were kind of the original digital storytelling gurus that we as a collective look up to, so Pip Hardy and Tony Sumner from Patient Voices UK and the Pilgrim Project. And then they invited Laura Missoli Smith, who is involved with the University of Durham, and she's going to be talking about the digital storytelling program that's happening over there. Listen to the whole thing. There's so much interesting information, and at the very end we have a little sneak peek of the Uganda documentary that was filmed last year. So enjoy.
Speaker 2:I got to meet them at a conference in June, but of course, I have been following them for about 10 years. I've read everything that Pip's written. She's written a couple of masters and PhD looking specifically at digital storytelling and basically their biggest fans. So it was really cool to get to meet them in person at the conference.
Speaker 2:I was a little star struck, not going to lie, but everyone here who has taken the training through common language has heard of Pip and Tony before in Patient Voices because it's part of our history of digital storytelling slides right, the first people that I know of, anyway, who really started doing digital storytelling formally in sort of healthcare contexts, and so many of us here are involved in those types of worlds. So it's awesome, pip and Tony, to have you guys here today to share some of your wisdom with the collective, the common language collective, and friends. So maybe I'll start with this question If you could just give us a brief overview of the digital storytelling work that Patient Voices have been doing for those who aren't quite as familiar, and then I'll follow up with lots more questions.
Speaker 5:So we started Patient Voices 20 years ago and I think I think it's useful to set the context that we were working in healthcare education, developing online learning materials, and we had been commissioned to develop a program about clinical governance, which is was in those days and I guess still is, the UK's answer to quality improvement in healthcare, and it seemed to us to be quite a dull subject, quite academic, and we thought there must be a way of bringing it to life. So I'd been developing online and open learning materials for quite a long time by then and I'd always used stories to try and bring things to life and use examples and users jumping off points for reflection and asking questions and so forth, and we were trying to figure out a way of bringing this very dull subject to life and making sure that people were actually thinking about patients, because 20 years ago patients really weren't at the heart of healthcare. And around about that time, just about this time of year, an old friend came for dinner and just as he was leaving he said oh, have you ever heard of something called a digital story? And we said no. So he showed us a digital story that had been made in a community context, which was about a minute and a half long nothing to do with healthcare but very touching and because it was so short and so succinct, we thought, oh, this could be the ultimate reusable learning object, because we can insert these digital stories made by patients and other people involved in healthcare and then use them as prompts for reflection and discussion and debate.
Speaker 5:So that was kind of where we started. We were interested in actually creating a resource, and our first two storytellers both happened to be lawyers, but they told us that they didn't want to be anonymized. They were tired of being anonymized, they didn't want us to profit from their stories and they wanted their stories to be freely available to anyone who might want to watch them. So those desires that they expressed formed the kind of fundamental, I suppose, kind of ethical approach. The patient voices that the stories are all freely available. Storytellers are never anonymized unless they want to be and the stories can't be changed.
Speaker 1:Just to roll back a little bit there. We chose the name patient voices because we are far too smart for our own good. So we have constantly for 20 years been told do you only work with patients? Because actually the whole idea, in our clever liberal way, was that it was about people who are waiting patiently to have their voices heard, not about the voices of patients. Most of our presentations have a slide about two slides in that says patient definition, patient definition, voices definition Support the right one.
Speaker 2:We often talk about in our training how we sort of wish that in the 80s and 90s, when this was starting to roll out, that someone had selected a different name than digital storytelling. We often have the same challenge we talk about this as a community of helping people understand what is a digital story, what is digital storytelling. So it's nice to know that other people have those language issues around the terminology they choose. Another question, I guess maybe in this one I'll ask you, tony, but I would like to hear a little bit more about those early days. What was it sort of like for you guys starting out talking to people? I mean, 20 years ago you said people weren't really thinking about patients or experience.
Speaker 1:So tell us a bit more about those early days and what that was like for you guys In the early days we used to talk about compassion a lot, because stories and grab a connecting empathy give you a building empathy, connections compassion. And actually we would have people in the health cells say you can't talk to people about compassion, it's ridiculous. We laughed at a call completely irrelevant to healthcare. So we pushed on with that one. We started this. We sort of cobbled the technology together ourselves. It wasn't until we've been doing it for I think three years that Pip realized Story Center existed, and that was when she went back to visit family in California. So we have been working sort of a sort of looped round model based on the BBC Wales stuff and some things we'd thought of ourselves and things we've done before.
Speaker 1:That was also beset by the technological difficulties of the era. So we were trying to generate movies which you could stream down 36 kiloboard modem lines. We were trying to make things you could compress down into TV. We need things that still just sounded okay.
Speaker 1:The software technology was rubbish at the time. We started off with people bringing their own laptops and then the software never worked or they hadn't got the right machines. So then we bought our own laptops and then we bought our own software and then we iterated around several rubbish versions of video editing software. Still, we settled on Adobe Premiere Pro because it was the only game in town, because we wanted to be able to have something we could do with the stories afterwards. We didn't want to just run a workshop, walk away from the stories. We were trying to purposeively collect these learning objects and build a resource in a bank of learning objects, which meant they had to be maintainable, they had to be catalogable, which I'll come to later on when we talk about the work we're doing. I'm doing with Laura. And then we had to persuade people that they made a difference.
Speaker 2:Tell us about that, because you know that's still something. You know it's. I think it's less and less than probably 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, several years in, we would get people saying, well, you've only got a few stories, so we wouldn't make more stories. And then they would say you need more stories than they say. There's no research. So people do some research and then they would say you've got no evidence of impact, so we do some more research. You get to a stage of entity where you start showing the stories to more and more, to bigger and bigger conferences.
Speaker 1:I think we knew we probably got it right when a doctor came to one of our software conference, having seen not a particularly harsh story I mean, they're all stories by people who were involved in healthcare so they asked stories about loss, about cancer, about children dying, about sexual assault, about drug abuse, about mental health, all of these things. I can't deal with that sort of story. And we said, well, what if that patient walked into your consulting room tomorrow? I can't deal with a two and a half minute story made in a very measured fashion by a storyteller that's trying to not drive you away. However, how are you gonna deal with that man crying in front of you in a consulting room? So I think that was one of the things that we learned over the years.
Speaker 5:I think the thing that we learned from that was always to give a trigger warning at the beginning of every time we show some stories and at least warn people. I think I went to a conference actually in Calgary and the person who was introducing me said I've heard about your story, so I have extra tissues in my handbag Quite a good thing. But I think we have come up with different sorts of impact. But when we first met Laura, one of the things that we were troubled by was how difficult it was to actually demonstrate impact, and I think I might be able to help you with that. So we've been kind of working on that in various ways.
Speaker 2:That is great to hear. We will have lots more questions about that because that is a continually arising conversation in our mentorship meetings is talking a little bit about that, and actually our next continuing education session that's coming up is actually looking at digital storytelling impact and ways to measure and quantify and qualify the work for people who are interested but are not entirely sure they should commit funding to it, and that's a situation that a lot of us have found ourselves in. I love this idea but, right, and just even hearing some of those conversations, that just helps validate some of the challenges that many of us face. And again, we're probably facing a lot less stiff headwinds than you guys did 20 years ago, but there's still some of these same things, right, and we have these same conversations Like, if you can't handle the emotion of the story, this is what people live every single day, and here you want to anonymize this person, and yet this is this person's life.
Speaker 2:What is the possibility that creating the story is going to re-traumatize them? They live this every single day, right, and so these are some of the same conversations that we've had with different partners that we've been involved in. But I think let's watch a story. I think it's always great to get to see the other people's sort of the experiences through the eyes of a storyteller and all of us as facilitators most of us as facilitators you sort of you watch a story and you also learn about the facilitator who helped make it happen right and the way that they do things. So would you like to start with getting to the bottom of things?
Speaker 5:After we watched the story, maybe we could just tell you a little bit about some of the impact that it's had as well.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Do you want to set it up a little bit for us before I click Play? Yeah.
Speaker 5:Was created in a project we were commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing in the UK to actually, well, they wanted us to create training videos for a project about improving continent's care and care homes, and we explained that we didn't do training videos and we went back and forth a bit and finally we said, well, why don't we do some digital stories? They wanted us to focus on three conditions rheumatoid arthritis, dementia and Parkinson's. And so this was one of the people with rheumatoid arthritis and because it was so difficult for her to travel, I actually went and spent a weekend with her at her house and we made the digital story over that weekend.
Speaker 2:And how long ago was this story created? 2007, I think Back before I even knew what digital storytelling was.
Speaker 3:As you heard before, this is part of a screening. So at different points throughout this podcast I've cut out digital stories. You can still find them in the show notes if they are public stories. So the first one, getting to the bottom of things, was shared. There was a conversation and I actually picked up the podcast again when Pip answers someone's question about how they work with a storyteller to share more intimate details.
Speaker 5:We don't tend to recruit our storytellers. We usually leave that to whoever it is that's commissioned us. So I think because she was involved with N-RAS, which is the National Rheumatoid Arthritis Society, I presume she volunteered. We hardly ever conscript people, we rarely force them. But she and I had had quite a bit of correspondence and several telephone calls beforehand and, as Tony was alluding to before that, what the R-CN really wanted was her to be described about. This is what happens to me when I go to the bathroom. She knew it was a project about continence care, so it was obviously going to be a bit intimate, or it was likely to be a bit intimate. So we'd already established a rapport, I think even before I went to see her, and we'd kind of figured out that we got on pretty well. She has a lovely sense of humour.
Speaker 5:We had lots of things in common and so we had a nice time together. But we really encouraged people to write their own scripts and she was very happy to do that. She had the most beautiful handwriting I think I've ever seen, despite her wrists and things, and she wrote it all out in longhand and then she read it and recorded it and then she said, oh, I think I'd like to change a few things. She really wanted it to be in honour of her husband who had cared for her, but she also wanted it to make a difference in terms of care and thinking about the person behind the patient. We try we make a lot of effort to try and establish a rapport and try to brief people carefully and have a chat with them before workshops and tell them what to expect and give them an opportunity to meet us and ask questions. Most people are really proud once they've done it. They feel hugely accomplished that they've managed to make this little video.
Speaker 1:I think emphasizing the control and agency that the storyteller has, it helps as well. If they can write the script, they can choose the pictures. They record it, they can have the name on it if they want, speak knowledge for their contribution, their work. No one will change it after the story's been made. They get to put it together. So if you can emphasise to them and explain to them that they're not going to be sat down in front of a camera for two hours, be videoed and then someone's going to take that video away, chop it up and put it and reprocess it and put it back out like a hamburger, then I think that helps as well.
Speaker 2:This idea of building rapport. That's an interesting one we should spend a bit more time thinking about, because being able to go for a whole weekend drink some wine, talk about kids, it's not always possible. But there could be other ways that you can help develop that rapport and the way that you engage and interact with people. And I think we talk a lot about the intake phone calls. Before you meet a storyteller, you talk to them, you build rapport there. But there might be other ways. And maybe Pip and Tony, that might be a follow-up question, just because it seems this is a good topic. When you don't have a chance to go spend a weekend with someone, how do you build rapport with them in a way that allows them to feel like they can open up? Tony, you just talked about the agency and the process, emphasizing all of that stuff. But is there other ways where you've approached really sensitive topics and been able to develop rapport in a way that those storytellers felt well cared for through the process?
Speaker 1:I think that the group process helps. So I think it's a really powerful thing that you may have six or eight or 10 people in a room, or even in an online space, who have similar or related experiences. They may have all similar experience of mental health issues or a particular mental health condition or a particular physical condition. They may have experiences of sexual abuse. They may have experiences of growing up in a culture which pulls them from their family and their culture and shifts them off to be turned into some other people. They may have been through traumatising situations or crashes, and so the group process is a very supportive one, and we found that that helps people to come together.
Speaker 1:Pip is a qualified counsellor as well, and that allows her, over the years, to bring some of the skills in small group work into that process. It also means we can say to storytellers in the workshop that we do have someone who is a qualified counsellor in the workshop. We always have two facilitators so that if someone a storyteller does get into a deep story that becomes difficult, one of us can talk to that person and help them come back from the brink or come back into their own story. We also, over the years have learnt it's good to have clinical supervision. You can pick up an awful lot of stuff from working with people, even with physical conditions. I mean, we came back from a workshop with people with persistent cough, which is a horrible condition. You pick up all sorts of things from the people you're working with because we're such a plus proximity so you have to keep yourself safe so you can make them safe and make the stories safe as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know that's a big part of what the collective is all about is we have this community of practice where we can help keep each other safe. Right, and I love the connection between when we keep each other safe, we're allowed to open up spaces like that for others, and it enables us to do that in a more profound and compelling way. So I love that comment.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, tony Often people say stories are so dark and so gum. And then you actually talk to people about how the story ends and pretty much every story has a shape. Has anyone seen the Kurt Vonnegut presentation on YouTube about the shapes of stories? If you look on YouTube and look for the shapes of stories by Kurt Vonnegut, it's a lovely presentation. I mean, it's old enough to be done with chalk and a blackboard. But he talks about the shapes of stories in a way which was I mean, he's a very, very famous science fiction author.
Speaker 1:It was his failed master's thesis. They failed him for it. But yeah, have a look at that. And when you're working with storytellers, get them to think about the shape of their story. Now, if it's just sort of a monotonic, linear progression from waking up in the morning to being in a hospital at 10 o'clock at night and it's just step by step by step by step by step, that's really not very interesting. But if you wake up and think, oh my God, I haven't put the bins out, but I've got a broken leg, then you can change the shape of things and make it more interesting.
Speaker 2:That's a great one. We talk a lot about story mountain that provides some shape to a story and exciting instant climax, all that stuff, the rising action, and I can't wait actually to watch the Kurt Vonnegut one. We often talk about meaningful moments, right, and the meaningful moments is where sometimes we'll start to figure out what story someone wants to tell. And so for you guys, as you look back over the past 20 years, what would be your meaningful moment?
Speaker 5:Working with Jean to make that story was definitely one of the high points. One of us has to say that winning the British Medical Journal Award was a pretty meaningful moment. So this was in 2010. People could nominate you for an award and we asked a few of our friends to nominate us and we had to write a bunch of stuff and so we were actually shortlisted into categories. So this is for us, this was a really big deal. You know, they have a big award ceremony at a swanky hotel in London and we never learned anything like that before, and we were shortlisted in two categories. So we were pretty excited about it. And we won the Excellence in Healthcare Education and then we were runners up in communication healthcare communication, I think it was so that I mean, that's got to be a big, sparkly moment.
Speaker 2:As much as we say we do this because it matters. Some external validation helps.
Speaker 1:It's also validation of a very high level of digital storytelling and its use. With Laura, we gave a presentation to a delegation from Peking University. One of the things that we put into that was just a slide of the various awards that we've been lucky enough to be nominated for over the years, because actually that is a validation of digital storytelling as well as our skills. So people are struggling to justify digital storytelling. There's a link to those awards that gives credit to what we all do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100%. That is a great one. Sometimes digital storytelling facilitators just generally they don't go out and search for accolades. You know, in a way, that other other discipline sort of you know, encourage that a lot more. I think we need to do that as a collective. You know, for all the facilitators here, common language. You know like we need to make sure that if there are things that we can submit, for it may feel like you're looking for some accolades for yourself, but ultimately it builds the community of digital storytelling and enhances all of our ability to go out and say look, this is the type of impact. I think we all need to apply for some sort of award this year.
Speaker 1:In that case, I'm going to put in a shameless plug for our crazy Greek friend, mikalis. Mikalis has decided that in 2024, on the island of Zekintos, there will be a digital storytelling festival. So not a conference, but actually an opportunity for people digital storytellers to submit their stories, always like a small film festival. If you're thinking, if you've got a story which you've made or one of your storytellers have made and you feel like submitting it, then watch this space.
Speaker 5:How far would you do the email bike and then you can turn it.
Speaker 2:I'll make sure we pass that along. Yes, I mean all of us here have stories that we will submit. I've got some. I'm already thinking of like five. Whether or not I can make it to Greece, that is a little less certain. Let's watch another story. Do you want to set up Brave really quick for us, Pippertoni?
Speaker 1:We've done projects where we worked with young people with serious allergies and their parents and gathered the stories and brought them back together. We've done projects with young people with sickle cell and their siblings and their parents and brought the stories back together at the end to build a connection and a rapprochement between those three groups. This story was part of a project done with the psychology department at Edinburgh University to look at different aspects of people with depression. So we worked with clinicians and statisticians who worked around the area of depression. We worked with the parents of young people with depression. We worked with young people with depression themselves and we worked with with adults with depression. This was a story made by a lovely woman about her experience of being a parent of a young daughter with depression.
Speaker 5:I think it's worth saying that, in contrast to the other story, which was made in a very kind of intimate, intense situation over a weekend, that story was created online during COVID, so it was in an online workshop over six weeks. We had two hours a week for six weeks and the reason we wanted to show you that story was because she's so creative. It was completely her idea to use the band aids and the coins, and so many people have commented on the opportunity that digital storytelling gives them to remember their creative side and to do something that they wouldn't normally do, so we just thought that would be a nice story to show and the fact that it was created over a long time I think it was one of the benefits of running online workshops that people had lots of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they can even go back and do some more editing and return to it. I wanted to bring Laura in to the conversation. Thanks, pip and Tony, for sharing those stories with us, but Laura sorry I should say Dr Laura there is some exciting stuff happening at Durham. I have been all over their website recently. Laura, I'm super glad that you're here, but why don't you really quickly just share how you are engaging with the medium of digital storytelling and sort of a bit of your background, and then we'll talk more about your work and where you're going with things at Durham?
Speaker 4:Thanks, mike, and thanks very much for inviting me to join you.
Speaker 4:I think this is such a lovely forum and such a great idea.
Speaker 4:I have worked within the School of Education at Durham and before in education and before that in anthropology and sociology, and always been interested in narrative, what I refer to as narrative and what their research that I do tends to refer to as narrative, as long as I can remember, because for me it seemed obvious if I was wanting to understand experience, narrative was one of the most powerful ways to do that.
Speaker 4:And then also in Zekintos, as it happened, on a September evening, I heard Pip and Tony do a keynote at the International Digital Storytelling Festival and I was struck, as many people have been struck, and I've seen many people who haven't encountered digital stories before, or not so directly, also be struck in the same way by the power of what a short, reflective, distilled story can do, and we have been working together as much as we can ever since, and then this amazing opportunity arose at Durham, and so now Pip and Tony are fellows within this new platform for the medical humanities at Durham, and so their expertise and their skill and a real focus on digital storytelling has become a quite central part of the work of the Narrative Practices Lab, which is the part of it that I'm co-leading, yeah, the Narrative Practices Lab.
Speaker 2:So this is super cool. Tell us a little bit more about narrative practices as a field within the medical humanities.
Speaker 4:I think what's really distinctive about narrative practices is that it's a space that is being created which tries to really sit across theory and practice. Firstly and that's always been something I've been trying to do it's very hard to do. You either get drawn more into the theory as an academic, or maybe you're a practitioner. That is, in your practice space. But something about narrative practices really tries to attend to the multiple ways in which all sorts of brilliant work is happening around narrative and health care globally. All sorts of I mean digital storytelling is absolutely at the heart of it, because it's such a structured, strong field, as you say, a community of practice in that sense.
Speaker 4:Within medical humanities, which I was not a part of until about 18 months ago, it has been one steep learning curve, oh my goodness. But what's great about the platform is the idea that medical humanities needs to broaden out, it needs to be more accessible if it's to really make a difference in health care. It needs to not just exist in small university institutes. They brought me in as a social scientist who doesn't really do any medical humanities in order to bridge that divide, which is great, challenging but great. Narrative practices for me is the way that we will do this because there are so many people using narrative who don't think of themselves as a medical humanities scholar who don't even read medical humanities literature but actually have so much to contribute to the medical humanities field.
Speaker 4:And equally, if there can be a more kind of effective dialogue, some of the insights and the thinking within medical humanities can also help us. Then, I think, questions around impact and scale and criticality and ethics there's so much that hopefully can, in this process of dialogue, raise the profile of narrative in ways that ultimately will just improve experiences of health and well being, which is the aim.
Speaker 2:Yes, I love it. You know, even just having a bit of a subfield of narrative practices, that being a bit of a rallying cry to bring people who are doing these very disparate things but all centered around storytelling in health care or medical context. You know, and sometimes we'll interact with different health researchers or people in the health care system who know stories matter but don't know quite how you know they matter or how to create stories that matter, and that's where I think we end up doing a lot of introduction to people, having another field to draw on to sort of connect people in with a community who is looking specifically at narrative and stories to change beliefs, attitudes and values and behaviors in health care systems. You know, it's exciting for me to know that you guys are going to be looking into that a lot deeper in your work. So, very cool. Let's watch a story, because I want to make sure we've got time for the story. You have a story called Enough.
Speaker 4:It's part of a module I teach. It's a first year module, so our first year has come to Durham on an education studies degree or they might be doing joint education and we asked them at the end of this module historical and philosophical ideas of education to make a digital story about themselves as a learner. I think it's a great assessment because students with real world assessment are going to be thinking differently. But the idea is that it links their own and this is another kind of huge interest I have linking their own personal knowledge or the sphere of knowledge they don't necessarily think belongs in an academic essay. We then asked them to write a reflective piece and link that into some theory and we teach theory around mental health and around the development, psychological theories of development. So there's scope for the students to choose that.
Speaker 4:It's very much up to them to link into it and we run some quite short but we, over three weeks we run some digital storytelling sessions and seminars with them to give them in that time frame as much as we can of the tools to go off and make a story, and this story was made by one of the students called Scarlett. The story itself has had a real impact. It has gone with me to presentations elsewhere and people have asked if they can then play it to their students and their staff. So it is one of these stories that has traveled and had impact.
Speaker 1:I love that we've seen stories based on very different visual treatments and that it's not just the great photographers amongst us or the people with amazing treasure trove of pictures can actually do this stuff effectively. I think that it's really good that people can do it with whatever tools they've got available to them, and that again goes back to the giving people reassurance that their picture doesn't have to be on this. They can draw it, they can sketch it, they can use band-aids, they can do watercolors, they can cartoon it, whatever they like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's something we've talked about a little bit. There's lots of people in different workshops who have artworks, other types of artwork that they've created. I'm doing one right now where a young man painted mountains as he was going through his brain tumor experience, and those paintings are a central piece of the metaphor. He's developing this story and I love that idea of digital storytelling can bring in other mediums and that way it's a big tent, right, he can bring in all these other mediums and use them within the stories in different ways. One of the things that I'll say really quickly before we wrap up here is I love connecting with other facilitators right, Because you get new creative energy sort of brought in and new ideas that come up. Because it is easy for me and I know it's easy for some of the other facilitators here, when you've been doing a lot of stories, for them to get a bit repetitious in the way that you're creating them, right, and I have really appreciated all three of these stories reminding me of different ways to tell a story and also I would say it really emphasized for me sort of the value of the story itself.
Speaker 2:And sometimes, because I'm a filmmaker also, I get pulled towards the visual, and I know some of us are photographers. I think the simple, the simple-ness of the visual aesthetic of these stories, and yet the power that they have without even music, is a great reminder of the primacy of the story. Right, if you write a good story, the visuals will complement it. Even if they're very basic and simple, they can have a really compelling sort of addition to a story that's really well told to begin with. The last thing I'd like to ask Laura and Pip and Tony is you know, laura, for you, you know here we are on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, but it's been just awesome connecting with you and Pip and Tony and hearing a bit more about your work. How do we sort of stay up to date on the things that you are up to in the future with the narrative practices lab and just all the stuff you've got going on in Durham?
Speaker 4:Well, I will absolutely be delighted to let you know. But because we're in this really early first few months, we're doing a big launch in the spring. There'll be an external website, we'll have a mailing list, we'll do talks, so all of that would be great for you to be involved with and I can let Mike know the details of that Also. We are hoping to do work that's really collaborative. So it's not just about kind of us putting on things. We want to be as collaborative as we can.
Speaker 4:We're doing an event in the new year for storytellers in health. There'll be opportunities for you to maybe join us in events where we think collaboratively about what matters to us all in terms of scale and ethics and evidence and impact, so that we're shaping that discourse as well. We're not just feeling we have to deliver certain things. I think that's what's also really important to the lab. We have our own agency in that respect. We know what matters. If we sit with people and we make stories and we then see the stories being played over and over, we're the best people to really think about what it means then to talk about evidence. So I would love for you all to feel you can get involved in events and we will let you know as they happen, certainly from the new year.
Speaker 2:You know, I think we're trying to, as a collective, trying to reach out to different groups because, like we said a number of times today, it's the cross-pollination really is important and especially the demonstration of impact, the evaluation. I know everyone here is very interested in that and that seems like that's going to be a piece of the work that you're doing in Durham, laura. So thank you for keeping us in the loop. We want to stay in the loop. Pippin, tony, how about you guys?
Speaker 5:Christy was asking more about impact and I just wanted to say about Jean's story because I said I would say a little bit about the impact. So one very important impact was that the Royal College of Nursing went after they watched the 12 stories that had been created, they went back to their curriculum that they had determined for their training program to improve continents, care and care homes and they just scrapped the whole thing and said, oh, we need to rewrite the curriculum based on what we're learning from these stories. So I thought that was a very awesome impact. And then one of the other impacts and actually that was it's probably also a memorable moment for me but I showed that story at the Royal College of Medicine in London and one of the doctors who was watching said hmm.
Speaker 5:She said I always start my consultations with patients with rheumatoid arthritis by saying how is your pain on a scale of one to 10? But she said but now I'm going to start my consultations by saying have you had any social life recently? Are you actually managing to get out and see people? And I thought that was a pretty awesome impact as well If she kind of thought a little bit differently about the way she saw her patients and acknowledged you know what she? What she noticed was that this was a person and not just a patient with rheumatoid arthritis, and how difficult it might be for her to get out and see people. So I thought those were two really good examples of impact and I think in the presentation maybe that Tony is putting up, there's also a slide with impact over a kind of long term project that we did with Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust over six or seven years and some of the impacts that the stories actually had in their organization, including using the stories in recruitment, recruitment interviews and actually showing people stories and using them to determine whether the applicant shared the same values as the trust, whether they could cope with the emotion of the story, and sometimes they couldn't. I think those are some maybe slightly unexpected impacts that I think they're really valuable.
Speaker 2:Laura, pip and Tony. Thank you so much. A couple of final wrap up things, just from a common language perspective. Anyone here in Calgary you are invited to the Friends and Family screening of Caregivers in the Wild, season 2 of the web series. A lot of the family caregivers will be there and we'll watch the stories, we'll interview them. It's going to be a great night. And also we have been doing a lot of training of new facilitators in East Africa and Kristi and I will be going back there a number of times this year and our documentary film Chronicling the Experience of the East African Digital Storytelling Facilitators is complete and we will be watching it together. And I thought I'd just share a really quick highlight. From the very beginning You'll get to hear from Barbara, nima and Robbins, three facilitators that I trained five years ago, who are doing amazing things in Uganda. So here is just the opening of that DST doc. Here we go.
Speaker 3:There is much meaning in stories, meaning which is very impactful.
Speaker 1:Storytelling being part of African life, I think this is the best way to bring out what these people can share.
Speaker 3:Your story has value and it will impact somebody, so you want to encourage them to speak. People connect through stories.
Speaker 2:There we go. That's it. That's all I wanted to share with you guys. It's a 20 minute doc and it shows the process start to finish and that's the screening of the story that was created, and it was an hour and a half conversation about gender equality. We've got a lot of premieres happening all over East Africa of this, because many universities are getting excited about digital storytelling in their micro research projects. It's super excited to share that with you guys.
Speaker 3:Friends, as I've mentioned, we included any of the stories that are public many of the links in the show notes, as well as with the blog. You will be able to find all of that information there. If you were interested in finding out more about the digital stories that were shared or the projects, I also wanted to mention that if you are interested in coming to a future kitchen table night, you can sign up through common language dstorg. If you go right to the top of the page, there's a spot called initiatives right, there's kitchen table nights and get on the list. We'll let you know when the next one comes up. They do happen four times a year.
Speaker 3:There's different stories shared each time and it's always about the conversation that comes from those digital stories. Everyone has a story to tell. We would love to hear from you. We always include a link to the stories we're talking about in the episode show notes. Please let us know what resonated for you in today's episode. Your comments will be passed on to the storyteller. You can email us at LTSpodcast2023 at gmailcom, or find us on Instagram at leadingthroughstories. Leading Through Stories is sponsored by Common Language Digital Storytelling. Facilitate a training for health and wellness changemakers. Don't miss the next episode. Subscribe to Leading Through Stories on your favorite podcast platform.