Communication and Healthcare Experiences with Jessica Mudry

There is a saying that nothing is certain in life but death and taxes. Clearly, there is a lot more certain in life, with perhaps the most important one being healthcare. 

Healthcare is something that we all encounter throughout our lives. Health is something that many of us may take for granted, but is always something that is in flux. We might ponder that our bodies are in a process of continuously breaking down, with a long spiral toward entropy, or a gradual decline toward disorder. Healthcare helps to delay that process to whatever extent we can, trying to stave off the inevitable and provide a footing upon which we can exist with some amount of comfort, stability, and security. 

A pandemic of course can bring this into stark focus. There is a certain vulnerability to having mass illness with unknown origins, unfamiliar symptoms and contagiousness, and potential fatal consequences. 

A lack of healthcare, a feeling of illness, not having knowledge about how to fend off disease all can make us feel exceptionally vulnerable. And scared. 

Some will say that our belief in superstition, magical thinking, and even religious belief all are our way of dealing with this uncertainty around our physical wellbeing and impending doom. 

Likewise science is another tool with which we can stave off our decline and try to have some control through making choices to improve our health and extend our lives. 

But how do we translate scientific knowledge and advances so that people can follow them? And how might we use innovative design to improve healthcare outcomes?

Dr. Jessica Mudry is focused on these questions through the work she does at Toronto Metropolitan University. There she is a Professor and Chair of the School of Professional Communication. She also is the Director of the Creative School’s Healthcare User Experience Lab. Here she uses her background in science and communication to generate ideas and create content to improve healthcare outcomes and improve health equity. 

In this episode, we talk about her path from chemistry to communication. We explore narrative theory, rhetoric, and language, and how we can apply them to scientific communication. 

She talks about how we have to learn to tell stories about science. We can’t just tell one story, but have to understand how different stories can resonate with different audiences. Her work in science television demonstrates how you tell stories well, and how the best stories will win attention. We have to take inspiration from how young people communicate, and rethink what it means to have create academic content. 

Finally we talk about how Canadians are nice, how to create better impact measurements in academia, and how we can find humanity in healthcare.

Dr. Jessica Mudry - https://www.torontomu.ca/procom/people/jessica-mudry/

Healthcare User Experience Lab - https://www.torontomu.ca/healthcare-user-experience-lab/