Creating online animated videos to reach and engage youth: Lessons learned from pain science education and a call to action

Abstract

Abstract Engaging youth in evidence‐based health education has the capacity to positively impact their experiences of health and illness across the lifespan. In particular, pain science education is now an established part of the treatment arsenal for persistent pain conditions in adults, and there are calls to build educational resources for youth with pain. In this paper, we argue that high‐quality online animated videos are a potentially excellent medium to engage youth at a mass level in pain science education. We present and compare two collaborations between clinician‐scientists and industry to create and disseminate online animated videos for pain science education (“Mysterious Science of Pain” and “Tame the Beast”). We discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and methods of evaluation for each approach, as well as summarizing overall lessons learned. We provide this information as a guiding framework for clinician‐scientists to collaborate with industry in building engaging and impactful health education resources for young people.

Keywords

• call to action
• online animated videos
• pain science education
• pediatric pain
• YouTube