Medical Content Creation: Reflecting on Your Experience or Perspective

Reflecting upon your experience or perspective in medicine is a powerful place to start for content creation. Each individual has unique experiences and perspectives. So, one can take almost any topic and speak to one’s experience or perspective and generate something interesting for others to experience. This modality of content creation crosses other categories of content creation in that your experience and perspective can be applied to all other idea generating topics. The unique part of sharing your experience or perspective, however, is that you have the opportunity to infuse emotion, attitude, personality, and anything else that makes the content distinctive to you and your personal voice.

The important questions to ask yourself, prior to starting to creating an experiential or perspective piece, include:

What is the significance of my experience or perspective?

Why am I sharing my experience or perspective?

How did my experience or perspective make me feel?

Once you have a medical content topic that you are interested in presenting, then you have to link your experience or perspective to achieve the desired effect and goal for the presentation of your medical content.

Some topics that would link well with sharing personal experiences or perspectives include:

• A meaningful patient interaction
• Sharing a difficult diagnosis or mystery illness that you were involved in evaluating
• An ethical dilemma (i.e., patient case, medical administrative issue, systems issue, interpersonal interactions, etc.)
• Observations from where you work (i.e., people, patients, staff, physical environment, processes, or systems)
• Things that you like about your medical work
• Things that you don’t like about your medical work
• Medical entrepreneurship or something outside medicine
• Working for a medical organization, hospital, or company
• Working in your own medical practice
• How your medical work affects you
• Societal stressors that affect you, your medical practice, your patients, or society from a health or medical standpoint
• Effects that a particular news or political issue have on you, your practice, your patients, or society from a health or medical standpoint
• How a specific patient experience affected you
• Something that resonated with you (i.e., quote, cultural experience, work experience, family experience, book, artwork, journal article, photo or image, procedure, etc.)
• A medical complication or procedural complication
• Missed diagnosis or challenging diagnosis that you made
• A specific medication or medical treatment
• Work-life balance in medicine
• Mental or physical health

Again, this is not a comprehensive list of ideas. But, it may spark an idea or lead you on a path to something else. Of course, if you are sharing particular aspects of patient care or patients themselves, make sure that you either have their consent to share information or you make sure that their personal health information is protected. You don’t want to disclose confidential personal health information. Also, if you work at an institution, understand what you are able to share without violating any contractual agreements.

As an example of creating medical content around experience or perspective, I recently described an aspect of being on call overnight in the pediatric cardiothoracic intensive care unit and my perspective on the role of the pediatric intensivist. Personal experience and perspective can be a powerful tool in generating medical content because people get to experience something through you that they may never have the opportunity to experience on their own.

What is something that you can share from your experience or perspective?