You're struggling to connect with clients as a patient advocate. How can storytelling help bridge the gap?

Today, at Rare Across America, a nine-year-old girl shared her story, and the impact was profound—not just on me, but on the legislative aide in the room. She spoke about the minimum five-hour drives to see a doctor and the inequities in access to medical care due to finances or geography. Hearing this from a child who had to become her own advocate at just eight years old was incredibly powerful. Her words underscored the urgent need to amplify the voices of young patients in our advocacy efforts. Her words, her story, has not only moved myself, but countless others. One can never underscore the value in hearing from those most directly impacted by their journeys from the halls of hospital to those of our legislative and judicial arenas.

I believe: Story telling is everything in all forms of communication. It is more effective, powerful, and impactful and is being used since forever. From religious scriptures to scientific papers everything that has an impact is a story.

Storytelling is almost inherent to all of us. It serves as a means of communication, entertainment, education and messaging. Storytelling in patient advocacy is critical because it highlights the importance of the lived experience while also conveying critically needed knowledge on the subject matter in an engaging manner. Project Sleep is a great example of this with their Rising Voices program.

No story can be told without using emotions. In patient advocacy it is even more important to feel what patient is going through and use the right words and graphics. Emotional content goes hand in hand with storytelling. Ofcourse that is more likely to engage because if patients do not feel relatable they won't engage and find it helpful.

That's very true. It is actually related to storytelling and emotional content. The relatability factor comes with twi things: Writing content that is understandable Writing with emotions and great story It is also related how experienced you are in copywriting to drive engagement and conversion through your content.

I agree Trust comes as a byproduct of great storytelling and copywriting. It is an art to empathise with your target audience through your written content. The art lies in the depth of greatest spiritual human experiences. If you can't feel the pain, you can't write about it good enough and if you can't write good enough you can't build trust. And to feel pain you must read about patient stories, you must listen to the stories. The more input you get on that the better is the output.

Individuals on medical journeys sharing their journey actually is a great way to illustrate how unnecessarily complex and arduous the healthcare system is. Frequently in healthcare meetings there is the attempt to solve for problems we created. STOP and LISTEN to a person tell you their lived experience and we may be able to get out of their way and our own way in identifying better ways to partner in care journeys

That's right, Medical procedures with those big names and complex language can sound very complex to understand and even harder to go through. If somehow a patient advocate can tell stories of previous patients the procedures can sound more relatable to go through and easier to understand.