Digital story telling: Patient experiences of health and illness

DIPEx is a charity whose remit has been to develop a health web site aimed at health professionals, patients and their families. The web site focuses on digital stories told by patients about their experiences of a number of illness and health. The web site also has an active forum for questions, as well as links to other information resources.

Of interest to women
One section includes stories about pregnancy, antenatal screening, breastfeeding and making decisions after cesarean section. What I particularly like is that the web site also provides information that deals with questions and issues that arise in the story.

Other sections that may be of interest to women are breast and cervical cancer, immunization and young people's experiences, including sexual health.

The power of story telling
I did have a few technical difficulties with the web site. There were a couple of times that I went to listen to a story and the network or server was down.

But other times, everything worked very well and I really enjoyed listening to/watching the people tell their stories. To me, this was a lot more powerful than reading text about a particular topic.

How do you use story telling to get your point across?

Image: 'hey you!' cactusbeetroot
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