Podcast for parents in East Africa

In eight episodes, we tell stories to teach parents principles for assessing health claims and making informed choices. Available in both English and Luganda.

The podcast is available on YouTube in English and Luganda .

Informed Health Choices project · Informed Health Choices podcast (ENGLISH)

About the Podcast

We created the Informed Health Choices (IHC) podcast to teach the parents of primary school children in Uganda to assess claims about treatment effects and to make informed health choices, and evaluated it in a randomised trial where it was shown to have a large positive effect.

We also made a checklist (PDF) summarising the key messages from the podcast.

How did we develop this podcast?

We developed the podcast employing a human-centred design approach, where feedback from users and stakeholders informed many cycles of feedback and improvement. The topics and claims were identified from scanning recent mass media reports and interviewing parents. User testing showed that parents perceive the podcast to be useful. [Semakula 2019]

How do we know it is effective?

We evaluated the effects of the podcast in Uganda, randomly allocating over 500 parents of year-five students in two groups, where one group received the podcast and the other group did not. We compared both groups’ ability to apply the Key Concepts and found that the podcast had a large positive effect. [Semakula 2017].

What are the episodes about?

We created eight main episodes in the series, covering the nine Key Concepts (listed below) and using topics and claims identified by scanning recent mass media reports and interviewing parents. Each episode lasts about five minutes. One of the episodes (episode one) covers two closely related Key Concepts (1 and 9 below). Two additional episodes introduce the podcast and summarise the key messages from the first eight episodes, respectively.

Each episode includes a short story with an example of a treatment claim, a simple explanation of a concept used to assess that claim, another example of a claim illustrating the same concept, and its corresponding explanation. In each story there is a question about the trustworthiness of a claim, which is resolved by applying the relevant Key Concept. All episodes have a conclusion with a take-home message emphasising the concept. The examples used in the podcast are for claims about treatments for health conditions, which are of interest to the target audience, such as malaria, diarrhoea, and HIV/AIDS. We have also included claims about some common practices, such as contraception, which are of interest to our audience.

Which Key Concepts are covered?
  1. Treatments may be harmful
  2. Personal experiences or anecdotes (stories) are an unreliable basis for assessing the effects of most treatments
  3. An outcome may be associated with a treatment, but not caused by the treatment
  4. Widely used treatments or treatments that have been used for a long time are not necessarily beneficial or safe
  5. Opinions of experts or authorities do not alone provide a reliable basis for deciding on the benefits and harms of treatments
  6. Identifying effects of treatments depends on making comparisons
  7. Apart from the treatments being compared, the comparison groups need to be similar at the beginning of a comparison (i.e. ‘like needs to be compared with like’)
  8. The results of single comparisons of treatments can be misleading
  9. Decisions about treatments should not be based on considering only their benefits

These nine concepts were selected based on our judgements about how important they are and how difficult they are to learn. Eight of the concepts are also introduced in the primary school resources. The third concept listed above is not included in the primary school resources.

 

Research publications

We developed and evaluated this podcast in a research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
See the final report.

Articles from this research project

Development of the key concepts

Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman AD, Sewankambo NK. Priority setting for resources to improve the understanding of information about claims of treatment effects in the mass media. J Evid Based Med. 2015;8(2):84-90.

Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Oxman AD, Chalmers I, Nsangi A, Glenton C, Lewin S, et al. Key concepts that people need to understand to assess claims about treatment effects. J Evid Based Med. 2015;8(3):112-25.

Chalmers I, Oxman AD, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Ryan-Vig S, Pannell S, Sewankambo N, et al. Key Concepts for Informed Health Choices: a framework for helping people learn how to assess treatment claims and make informed choices. BMJ Evid Based Med. 2018;23(1):29-33.

Developing evaluation tools

Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Nsangi A, Semakula D. Interventions and assessment tools addressing key concepts people need to know to appraise claims about treatment effects: a systematic mapping review. Syst Rev. 2016;5(1):215.

Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman AD, Chalmers I, Rosenbaum S, et al. Measuring ability to assess claims about treatment effects: the development of the ‘Claim Evaluation Tools’. BMJ Open. 2017;7(5):e013184.

Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Guttersrud O, Nsangi A, Semakula D, Oxman AD, Group IHC. Measuring ability to assess claims about treatment effects: a latent trait analysis of items from the ‘Claim Evaluation Tools’ database using Rasch modelling. BMJ Open. 2017;7(5):e013185.

Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman AD, Sewankambo NK, Guttersrud Ø, Austvoll-Dahlgren A. Measuring ability to assess claims about treatment effects in English and Luganda: evaluation of multiple-choice questions from the “Claim Evaluation Tools” database using Rasch modelling. IHC Working Paper; 2017.

Davies A, Gerrity M, Nordheim L, Okebukola P, Opiyo N, Sharples J, et al. Measuring ability to assess claims about treatment effects: establishment of a standard for passing and mastery. IHC Working Paper; 2017.

Developing the podcast

Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman M, Rosenbaum SE, Oxman AD, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, et al. Development of mass media resources to improve the ability of parents of primary school children in Uganda to assess the trustworthiness of claims about the effects of treatments: a human-centred design approach. Pilot Feasibility Stud. 2019;5:155.

Evaluations

Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman AD, Oxman M, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Rosenbaum S, et al. Effects of the Informed Health Choices podcast on the ability of parents of primary school children in Uganda to assess claims about treatment effects: a randomised controlled trial. Lancet. 2017;390(10092):389-98.  (See also protocol)

Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman AD, Oxman M, Austvoll-Dahlgren A, Rosenbaum S, et al. Effects of the Informed Health Choices podcast on the ability of parents of primary school children in Uganda to assess the trustworthiness of claims about treatment effects: one-year follow up of a randomised trial. Trials. 2020;21(1):187.

Semakula D, Nsangi A, Oxman A, Glenton C, Lewin S, Rosenbaum S, et al. Informed Health Choices media intervention for improving people’s ability to critically appraise the trustworthiness of claims about treatment effects: a mixed-methods process evaluation of a randomised trial in Uganda. BMJ Open. 2019;9(12):e031510.  (See also protocol)

PhD dissertation

Semakula D. Improving critical thinking about treatment claims, evidence and choices. Development and evaluation of an intervention to improve the ability of parents of primary school children in Uganda to critically appraise the trustworthiness of claims about treatment effects and make informed health choices. Oslo: Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo; 2020.

Additional resources developed in the same project:

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