People are Absorbing Health Information from Popular Television Shows

Pharma Newshound · #1 24th October 2008, 01:21 PM

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation, September 16, 2008

According to two new studies released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, many television viewers are being educated about important health issues, while being entertained. In order to document how well viewers learn health information from entertainment television, the Foundation worked with writers at Grey’s Anatomy to embed a health message regarding mother-to-child HIV transmission rates in an episode, and then surveyed viewers on the topic before and after the episode aired. The study found that the audience’s awareness of this information increased by 46 percentage points (from 15 percent to 61 percent), a four-fold increase among all viewers.

The second study released by the Foundation and the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center’s Hollywood, Health & Society indicates that health content is prevalent on popular prime time television. An analysis of three seasons (2004-2006) of top-ten-rated prime time scripted shows reveals that six out of ten episodes (59 percent) had at least one health storyline, and that most of those storylines provided a strong (32 percent) or moderate (29 percent) level of educational content.

The studies also found that:

Seventeen percent of regular Grey's Anatomy viewers — or about three million people nationwide — said that they had tried to “find more information” about a health issue or “spoken with a doctor or other healthcare professional” because of something they saw on the show.
About three in 10 (29 percent) regular Grey’s viewers say they think the medical information on the show is ‘very’ accurate, while another 58 percent say it’s ‘somewhat’ accurate.
The most common health topic found in top-rated TV shows was an unusual illness or disease. This topic appeared more than four times as often as heart disease, five times as often as cancer, and 20 times as often as diabetes — all more prevalent medical conditions among the American populace.
Health storylines are much more likely to focus on symptoms (65 percent), treatment (59 percent) and diagnosis (50 percent) than prevention (10 percent).
One in 10 of the top-rated shows (10 percent) included a storyline about access to care, such as a lack of insurance, or cutbacks in services at medical facilities.

“Whether health information is placed in these shows deliberately or just occurs as part of the creative process, the fact is that viewers are being exposed to a lot of health information on prime time television,” said Sheila Murphy, associate professor of communication at USC, and lead author of the report titled, "How Healthy is Prime Time? An Analysis of Health Content in Popular Prime Time Television Programs". “Health-related content appears in comedies and dramas, hospital shows and shows that have nothing to do with the medical profession.”