Really, y’all. This blows me away. Last week, we had a thousand downloads of our podcast series in a single day.
A single day!
This incredibly niche podcast series, about equitable communication and education in healthcare, was downloaded 994 times in one. Single. Day.
WOOHOO! 1K in 1 Day!
I’ll tell you, it’s been fun watching the download rate climb over time. It’s amazing for me to even write ‘we’ve gotten used to a few hundred downloads a day.’ But this 1K was a surprise!
I think any show would be proud for a thousand downloads in a day. But for a home-made, self-funded, recorded-in-the-room-over-the-garage podcast series? Ah-mazing.
Do you know what this means? It means that nearly five years into the series, there’s still momentum! Still excitment! More and more people caring about and taking action on the same things.
This show draws on a long tradition of scholarship and activism, and the research, theory and policy made over multiple generations of scholars–many of whom are from minoritized and marginalized groups. It’s been my intention to cross some disciplinary border with this. Because that was the problem I saw.
You might know this story: I was in the education sector, on a project where I was talking to people in the health sector. And they were telling me about problems they were having with patient education, or health literacy. I listened and said, ‘we face some of those same issues in education, or in higher ed, or in policy.’ I began to think about the kinds of studies and research that I knew of, that might be helpful in the health sector.
I was doing this on a one-by-one basis, one conversation at a time, for years.
Then in 2017, I was talking with Dr. Michael Paasche-Orlow. He’s a physician in Boston and founded the journal Health Literacy Research and Practice. I was telling him what I was doing, and why I was doing it. And he said to me, he said, ‘It’s like you’re walking around with a backpack of the best studies in the world about learning and language, and you’re giving them to people!” Yeah i had to get this stuff off my back and into people’s hands!
The problem was, and is, academic silos. How do you get people to know about a research base in another discipline? How do you begin to make the connections clear?
Another problem, I’m just one person. And there’s a lot to share. And I want to be explicit about where all this is coming from and who’s been doing all the research that I’m sharing.
One solution suggested itself, something one person could do to spread the word: How about a podcast series? I’d not podcasted a day in my life. Neither had my brother Joe, who lucky for me was willing to team up and try to learn. But these problems were easy to solve, comparatively.
So really, I started this because of interdisciplinary work.
We take our audience seriously, and we take these topics seriously, and I’m hoping that comes through. I also wanted and needed this to be a teaching and learning environment. This series is based on issues and problems and questions that health professionals bring up. That’s an approach I learned from my program at Penn. I’m not dreaming up the topics. So as much as it’s mostly a monologue series, it’s still a conversation. We’re learning from each other, you and I. Our guests are very brave for reflecting about their practice and sharing that reflection with us.
I thought this would be a good time to share some meta-episodes you might not have heard. Shows about the show:
10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication Podcast Series Introduction
Yep, this is the first episode. Have you heard it yet?
Building momentum for health equity in health communication
I was invited to write about our series for an academic journal. Here’s what I wrote about.
Get more from each of our episodes: 4 ways to listen
This series aims to accomplish a lot in 10 minutes. Here’s 4 ways to get even more out of each episode.
I’ve long thought that to teach a course or lesson in anything is an act of hope. This milestone, a thousand in a day, gives me hope.
Thank you so much for listening, subscribing, downloading (by the thousands!), sharing with friends, and writing me with ideas and feedback.
