Measuring the impact of an awareness campaign for sepsis among European country’s healthcare professionals

Project Background:

Sepsis kills 6-9 million people globally every year. In developed countries half of the deaths could be avoided if the condition would be diagnosed early enough and treated correctly. Because of its multiple and varying symptoms diagnosing sepsis is not easy, not even for healthcare professionals.

A hospital together with the according country’s biggest government body of a European country have taken on the battle against sepsis. An effective way to beat sepsis is to make healthcare workers aware about the critical situations when sepsis could be diagnosed, and the appropriate measures could be taken early enough.

In order to increase awareness among the very busy target group of physicians and nurses the government body has produced an interactive film. The film shows realistic, every-day situations of the target group. Users watching the film must react to every-day situations by choosing their actions in a given situation / setting (multiple choice). The film then shows the consequences of their actions – possibly leading to saving the life of a patient or else the death of the patient in the film. The new medium ‘interactive film’ allows for a very realistic setting. The film has been marketed towards healthcare workers in a campaign.

Part of the project was to measure the effect of the film and its message.

What we did:

The method used was a before-after measurement of the knowledge and actual behaviour of the target group.

The following dimensions were critical to prove whether the film had an effect on the target group or not:

Increase of knowledge within healthcare workers
Behaviour change
Quality of the film
Integration of the film into daily working routines

A series of consecutive online and offline surveys allowed us to prove whether the film has changed the target group’s knowledge and behaviour. Detailed before-after as well as prove questions have been integrated into the project design.

Results:

Based on the research insights we recommended ways to improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the ongoing campaign. The client draw out important learning outcomes from the survey results by seeing not only the impact the campaign had on its target group, but also how big the impact was.