A Year Into the #SeePainMoreClearly Campaign

Our team carried out a pilot Knowledge Mobilization Campaign in 2019 that aimed to raise awareness of the problem of pain in people with dementia and share evidence-based solutions for assessing and managing pain when caring for people with dementia. We developed our website containing a number of key resources (including a YouTube teaching video) and shared these resources as widely as possible using Twitter, a social media platform, using the hashtag #SeePainMoreClearly.

We then received funding from the Saskatchewan Health Research Foundation (SHFR) and Saskatchewan Centre for Patient Oriented Research (SCPOR) to expand the scope of our #SeePainMoreClearly initiative. On October 1, 2020, we launched a broader knowledge mobilization effort and aimed to continue the momentum of the #SeePainMoreClearly initiative.

Since the launch of our initiative, our team has expanded to include caregiver partners, health professionals, and researchers from across Canada. We worked with a marketing agency that provided their expertise to scale the production of evidence-based content. This coordinated effort has led to the revamping of our website, producing more blogs/stories from people affected by pain and dementia, and developing more resources and engaging images, influencer marketing, animated videos, and clips tailored to the needs of health professionals, researchers, patients and families, and policy makers. Our #SeePainMoreClearly initiative now goes beyond Twitter and YouTube to include Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Since October 1, 2020, we have shared over 650 posts across all social media platforms. Our website has been viewed by over 55,000 individuals from over 70 countries. We are continuing to evaluate the success of the #SeePainMoreClearly initiative through various social media metrics, questionnaires, and interviews of people who have engaged with the campaign.

Although our reach has expanded, our goal remains the same: to ensure that people affected by dementia, their friends and families, health professionals, and policy makers are aware of the problem of pain under-treatment and its grave consequences. By sharing research information, we hope to facilitate policy change to support the implementation of evidence-based solutions and improved practices in pain assessment and management for people with dementia. Ultimately, our goal is to share knowledge that will lead to improvements in the quality of life of people with dementia and their families.