Final Report Summary - HEALTH-TV (Enhancing public awareness on the results of European Health research actions through television media)
The EU-funded research on health encompasses a large variety of RTD issues and is among the leading-edge European initiatives supporting the implementation of the European strategy on life sciences and biotechnologies. The general public is however largely unaware of the activities carried out in the health theme and of the benefits that may derive from the exploitation of the results of this research. The creation of public awareness on health issues must therefore constitute a priority. The easiest and most efficient way to raise public awareness on such issues among the general public is broadcast media, i.e. the largest available dissemination platform existing today in the world. Unfortunately, high costs and low direct benefits are also a reason why projects do not include the development of audiovisuals into their dissemination plans. Such audiovisuals rarely reach a large audience and do not add substantial value to the research carried out by the project they aim to represent.
Against this background, the strategic objective of HEALTH-TV was to contribute to the development of public awareness on health research in all European countries, through television media.
HEALTH-TV reached this objective through the following activities:
- Enhance and fully exploit the audiovisual TV communication model developed by the project partnership over the past 10 years. This model had been already successfully implemented, upgraded, tested and validated by the Commission services in several projects in FP4, FP5 and FP6.
- Exploit the profound knowledge of the EU research programme in FP5 and FP6 owned by the consortium to identify the key messages of the research on health issues over the past years.
- Create a series of 15 high-quality free-of-rights video news releases (VNRs) for the general public on the basis of the key results of the research. Project's audiovisuals have been conceived in such a way to be easily adaptable to the needs of a wide spectrum of European TV channels, either for news or features usage.
- Include project's audiovisual productions into the http://www.youris.com video portal, managed by the HEALTH-TV partnership, for permanent show, thematic management of resources and archiving.
- Include project's audiovisual productions into the scientific and news TV broadcasting mainstreams of major national TV channels Europe-wide. The HEALTH-TV videos have been taken-up and broadcast on national TV stations in 28 countries: Algeria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, USA, Vietnam plus the pan-European 8-languages TV broadcaster Euronews. The total of 112 tracked take-ups and broadcasts constitute an average of about 8 take-ups and broadcasts per film.
The success of the project leads to the formulation of a number of key recommendations for the implementation of future similar actions modelled aiming to approach the media. New communication models, such as the one proposed by HEALTH-TV and youris.com should be implemented at a large scale and improved through the inclusion of complementary strategies focusing on online press and other media.
These opportunities would bring enormous benefits to the European Commission and, more in general, to Europe as a whole, as it would allow to open a large window on the European research, a window able to communicate its 'obscure' content to a non-technical, generic audience, which constitutes the large majority of the European citizens.
Against this background, the strategic objective of HEALTH-TV was to contribute to the development of public awareness on health research in all European countries, through television media.
HEALTH-TV reached this objective through the following activities:
- Enhance and fully exploit the audiovisual TV communication model developed by the project partnership over the past 10 years. This model had been already successfully implemented, upgraded, tested and validated by the Commission services in several projects in FP4, FP5 and FP6.
- Exploit the profound knowledge of the EU research programme in FP5 and FP6 owned by the consortium to identify the key messages of the research on health issues over the past years.
- Create a series of 15 high-quality free-of-rights video news releases (VNRs) for the general public on the basis of the key results of the research. Project's audiovisuals have been conceived in such a way to be easily adaptable to the needs of a wide spectrum of European TV channels, either for news or features usage.
- Include project's audiovisual productions into the http://www.youris.com video portal, managed by the HEALTH-TV partnership, for permanent show, thematic management of resources and archiving.
- Include project's audiovisual productions into the scientific and news TV broadcasting mainstreams of major national TV channels Europe-wide. The HEALTH-TV videos have been taken-up and broadcast on national TV stations in 28 countries: Algeria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Panama, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, USA, Vietnam plus the pan-European 8-languages TV broadcaster Euronews. The total of 112 tracked take-ups and broadcasts constitute an average of about 8 take-ups and broadcasts per film.
The success of the project leads to the formulation of a number of key recommendations for the implementation of future similar actions modelled aiming to approach the media. New communication models, such as the one proposed by HEALTH-TV and youris.com should be implemented at a large scale and improved through the inclusion of complementary strategies focusing on online press and other media.
These opportunities would bring enormous benefits to the European Commission and, more in general, to Europe as a whole, as it would allow to open a large window on the European research, a window able to communicate its 'obscure' content to a non-technical, generic audience, which constitutes the large majority of the European citizens.