Due to popular demand, and the need for better public education about the swine flu outbreak, Dr. Jon LaPook will be offering the first ever live webcast at CBS tonight.
Check it out here (click on the link if video below doesn’t work at 7pm):
This is the funniest public service announcement I’ve seen in as long as I can remember. Congratulations to the creative communications team at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons for putting this together!
Back story: I met Sandra Gordon, Director of Public Relations, at the AMA Medical Communications Conference (where I was faculty) and where she presented this video. After the show I approached her to say how surprised many of us were that Orthopaedic Surgery was leading the way in creative PR – and that it was quite unexpected. The PSA had almost a hint of Monty Python humor to it.
She responded with out batting an eye: “Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition!”
Would you know what to do if you needed an ambulance or if you had to go to an emergency room? During 2005, an estimated 115 million visits were made to emergency rooms in the United States – up 31 percent from 1995. About 14 percent of patients arrive via ambulance. Emergency rooms across America are overloaded – partly because many of the almost 50 million uninsured use the emergency room as their primary physician (and partly because we tend to focus on treatment of illness rather than prevention – but that’s another blog post).
During the next two segments, I will take you way behind the scenes and give you tips on how to be prepared in case the unexpected happens and you end up on your way to an emergency room. This week I play the part of a patient with chest pain and take you inside a New York City ambulance with paramedics Ray Cordi and Hanan Cohen. Next week my colleague, Richard Schlesinger, and I continue your tour inside the emergency room at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, the first time this institution (where I am on staff) has ever allowed such inside access to the media.
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