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In a September 2, 2022, article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), authors discuss the health care industry's latest intervention strategy to get the one-fourth of Americans who don't want the COVID shots, to get them.
It's called "improv theater" and it teaches health care providers how to improvise for each patient to ultimately get them to submit to the shots. Taking tips from methods of Forum Theater, a 1970s style of improvising drama productions, the CDC co-funded a 16-month project "to teach health care workers appropriate, authentic and respectful responses to patient expressions of bias in clinical encounters."
In use with patients, the medical improv "theater" addresses vaccine hesitancy and what the article's authors call "conspiracy theories" to convince their "audience" — patients — to get the shots. In scripted practice scenes, participants in the project used "a variety of scripted cases [to] address pregnancy, childhood vaccination, younger healthy adults, concerns about speed of vaccine development, and other reasons to fit the audience." The authors' conclusions:
"As the next phases of the global pandemic arrive and new ones may be on the horizon, addressing vaccine hesitancy will be a continuing challenge. This combination of improvisational theater techniques from the social justice movement grounded in evidenced-based motivational theory may help change vaccine-hesitant conversations, lighten the burden on health care providers, and improve the public's health."
SOURCE: JAMA September 2, 2022