URI pharmacy students’ PSAs earn recognition

Public service announcements produced by two teams of University of Rhode Island pharmacy students earned seventh and 11th place, respectively, in a national competition sponsored by the University of Minnesota School of Public Health that drew 67 entries.
The theme of the contest was “It’s Global,” and several of the entries had substantial production budgets. Eight URI teams participated, all from Professor Jeffrey Bratberg’s class on public health consequences of infectious diseases. None of the students got funding support for their projects.
The seventh-place entry, “Don’t Let the Flu Catch You,” showed how easy it is to get a flu shot at a local pharmacy; the 11th place entry, “Do You Know Your Exposure? Get HIV Tested,” emphasized the importance of universal HIV testing.
Third-year pharmacy students Nathan Bookbinder, Amanda Dugal, Samantha Longo, Sarah Norton and Rebecca Varney developed the flu shot ad, which depicted a flu shot clinic in a local pharmacy.
Dugal played the patient in the ad, which was shot at the North Kingstown Rite Aid where Bookbiner works. Norton, who is already certified to give flu shots, played the pharmacist in the ad.
“We wanted to emphasize how fast and easy it is to get your flu shot at your local pharmacy as opposed to waiting in line at the doctor’s office, having to make an appointment,” Dugal said. “People are already out picking up their prescriptions, picking up a few things at the store, so the pharmacist can do it right then and there.”
Pharmacy students Christine Barabas, Dagny Card, Amanda Ingemi, Audrey Menard and Craig Messer produced the 11th-place HIV spot, which focuses on how easy it is to be exposed to HIV.
“Ever feel like you have the flu?” the spot begins by asking. “This may be the only symptom of an early HIV infection. One in four people infected with HIV don’t know they have it.” Then the spot illustrates how a person’s sexual exposure grows rapidly with each new sex partner, so if two people have each had four partners, each has been exposed to 15 people, while if they’ve each had seven and their other partners have as well, it’s 127, and at 12, it’s 4,095.
“We wanted this to hit home,” Menard said. “It is a scary issue. I noticed after the PSA was finished, the whole room at the conference was silent. After the other PSAs, people would giggle, laugh or talk with the person next to them. This probably made people think. It probably made them all think, “That could be me,’” Menard said.
The HIV spot also won $400 in the PSA category of the URI Visualizations Film Festival Contest.
Bratberg had divided his class into eight groups and assigned them to come up with ideas for a 30-second PSA, backing up the information they presented with research studies.
“We wanted to show the pharmacist as the practitioner who is critical to prevention efforts, and we wanted to prepare our students for the real world,” he said. “So this exercise taught them how to get an important message across simply and quickly and with maximum impact.”
To see all eight PSAs, go to URI’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/user/UniversityOfRI.