“When coming up with an idea for my asset, one of the first things that came to mind was to create a video. This seemed like a great way to communicate information to others engagingly and understandably. Throughout the course, something that was always on my mind was the fact that there is so much information out there about COVID and the pandemic, and often it is difficult to digest it all and fully understand it. All of the articles, news stories, blogs and reports are primarily aimed at an adult audience, and even then, many adults struggle to understand what’s being talked about.

This led me to think about how children and young people must feel. Although children and young people don’t need to fully understand all of the complex information, it is still important that they know how to keep themselves and others safe from the virus. As well as keeping our physical health as protected as we can, it’s extremely important that we also look after our mental health. Even now mental health is often stigmatised, and many people are still reluctant to talk about their mental health. I see this as an important thing to tackle, and by helping young people understand that everyone has mental health and that it’s normal to talk about it, hopefully, the mental health of young people can improve, and in the future, these young people can educate future generations about the same idea of mental health importance.

While designing and planning my asset, I chose to aim it at an audience of young people, around the age of 10 and up, as I felt like at this age children can start to better understand about COVID and mental health. For this age group, I wanted to create a short simple video that would be able to get across key messages about COVID. The messages I chose to get across were –

1 – How to keep yourself and others safe from the virus.

2 – It’s normal to feel overwhelmed and there are always people to talk to about this.

To make my asset as accessible to people as possible, I chose to use simple pictures with limited on-screen words to ensure that it was understood easily by all. I also included subtitles to make it accessible for those with hearing difficulties, and I feel that the audio alone is enough to get across the information, in the case of those with vision problems.”

Ronan Hill

Nursing Studies

Undergraduate

Ancrum, Scottish Borders

Currents 2020

Featured Image: Photograph of Ronan Hill

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