Summary

The Training Gap & Harms

Roughly 75% of healthcare is self-care.  However, in 2020, Stanford’s Halsted Holman MD decried the massive failures and training gaps of our time.

The Failure:  Health providers need to INFORM health consumers about what works & ACTIVATE them to find it. “The profession has not done so.“

The Training Gap: Leading health profession educators agreed to provide interprofessional hands-on training to use social media to promote evidence-based practices (>2o years ago) … Most don’t.

Case in Point:  One in 3 adults have sleep problems.  Few know: (1)  CBT-I is the gold standard for insomnia, (2) FREE  digital CBT-I is a good first step, (3) Pills are unsafe for those who most often take them, not to mention their side effects.

Yet, by the time people see me, they have Insomnia AND Substance Use Disorder AND Anxiety AND Depression AND ‘learned helpless’ beliefs that keep them sick.  Usually, they have …

• Been persuaded by commercial hype and misinformation
• Spent years and too much money on misguided solutions
• Gotten hooked on pills they didn’t need to start & that no longer work
• Been convinced: They can’t sleep without a sleep aid and they tried ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ works.

Let’s Fix the Training Gap

We could stop the madness, unite to fight, and fix failures:

– FAILURE to fight the hype
– FAILURE to fight mis- or disinformation
– FAILURE to train interprofessionally as 1 community
– FAILURE to train together to use social media to promote health
– FAILURE to train together to inform & activate people to find what works.

As a former Georgetown Sleep Clinic member & Uniformed Services U Medical Psychology Course Director & Practicum Coordinator, I believe that the academic community could fix failures & close this by deploying online collective civic-engaged education & research for health promotion.

We seek partners for the next pilot, Speak Up for Sleep, which could prove the concept. First, it’s best to see how our  previous 2 GMU pilots – one with interns, another with course projects – have laid the foundation.

Pilot – Intern-Led Media Outlet

Pilot Questions:  Can an unpaid, online-based undergraduate internship develop & manage a no-code network – to inform & engage the public on democracy?
Could interns create a challenge for peers to compete to raise awareness and have the most impact (i.e., Speak Up GMU)?

The Internship

George Mason University programs offer undergraduate internships – for 3 and 6 credits. Over 50 interns (2018 – 2023) from diverse programs (e.g., Sociology, Politics, Geographic Science) took a risk on a new, unpaid, totally online internship.

Interns led the People’s Platform for Democracy (the non-profit, non-partisan US onAir Network) to inform & engage their community.  With no tech background and collaborating virtually, each cohort of US onAir interns learned just enough about Zoom, YouTube, Google, Canva, & WordPress to:

1.  Curate profiles (e.g., US Representatives, US Senators)
2.  Curate posts: (e.g.,  ’22 US House races, Democracy)
3.  Schedule & produce 1 on 1 interviews (e.g., in-person, online)
4.  Create brief ‘explainer’ videos (e.g., candidates, About Virginia onAir)
5.  Plan, schedule, produce, & and host livestream discussions, aka onAircasts (e.g., with government representatives; with subject matter experts on issues of interest)
6.  Direct one of the 50 State Hubs in the network (e.g., Virginia, Georgia, Michigan)
7.  Develop social media channels (i.e., VA onAir, US onAir)
8.  Establish a School Chapter
9.  Promote & run in-person events (e.g. Posts,  Livestream Videos)
10.  Promote the internship to other schools (e.g., recruitment video).
11.  Prototype a video-based ‘Speak Up’ Challenge

Paul and Joe designed a ‘Speak Up’ Challenge for students to compete to address their representative about what mattered to them. They created:  1) a ‘Speak Up’ post (with Google Docs for registration & a database), (2) a promotional poster, (3) a YouTube playlist of 10 model entry videos.

Intern Feedback:  Most expressed these positives …

– Learning skills (digital media, communication, leadership)
– Being more visible in their field of interest (e.g., online profile)
– Meeting local and national leaders
– Planning new hubs in the network (e.g., ‘India’ onAir).

Pilot – Course-Led Challenge

Pilot Question:  Can service-learners collaborate – across courses and semesters – to collectively design & pilot ONE health fitness communication campaign?

GMU Distinguished Professor Gary Kreps led the communication campaign pilot to target ‘Freshman 15’ weight gain. Guided by success factors of the VERB campaign, the goal was to make the challenge ‘easy, fun, & popular’ to join.  Spanning 3 semesters (2010 – 2011), 3 professors teaching 4 classes, offered learners the option to run a series of pilots for-credit.

COMM 820:  One student reviewed the literature on campus fitness competitions.
COMM 391  A few students surveyed 100 Freshmen to identify how to make it ‘easy, fun, and popular’ to join.
COMM 404:  Using survey data, four students designed the challenge using: a cash prize, credit-based participation, and an App (Wizit) with QR codes to verify laps between the campus and Starbucks.
COMM 200:  Half the class competed with the other half.

COMM 200 Feedback

• Earning credit made it easy to collectively pilot & compete
• Competing for ‘bragging rights’ made it fun  (no need for cash prize)
• They believed that they could make it popular – leveraging social media to develop an annual intercollegiate fitness competition – March Madness for Total Fitness.
  • Faculty Feedback
  • It was easy to add this for-credit service-learning project to their course.
  • It could enable a line of community-engaged research.

Civic-Engaged Scholarship

Service-learning projects resulted in the following …

– At the 2010 mHealth Summit we presented this poster
– At the 2011  Teaching Prevention APTR  conference, we presented at a symposium – Leveraging Technology to Impact Health in the Community.
– In 2011, I contributed a chapter in Technology Innovations for Behavioral Education.
– At the 2012 GMU Resilience Conference, retired Lt. Col. Mark Bates, PhD and I presented the pilots as a way to bring the DoD’s ‘Total Fitness’ culture to campus
– In 2012, Dr. Kreps and I submitted a grant application.