The OAB Care Continuum
NAFC’s OAB COntinuum Campaign - 2018
THE NEED
More than 37 million Americans live with Overactive Bladder, the condition responsible for the urgent and frequent need to empty the bladder. Our research has found that many with this condition fail to seek help and suffer in silence, while others who do seek help are all too often dismissed by their doctors without receiving meaningful support. Even those who have tried various treatments are frequently unaware that, if one approach is unsuccessful, there may be a number of others with the potential to produce better results.
This is unfortunate, because there is a wide range of treatment options available, including behavioral modification, medications, advanced procedures and even surgery. NAFC sought to illustrate this range of approaches to OAB sufferers and provide them with guidance to help them better manage their conditions.
STRATEGY
NAFC has long promoted the concept of a Care Continuum for OAB, a roadmap of sorts that gives patients a fuller understanding of the diagnostic and treatment process to them. Effective education on these matters is essential both because there is a considerable degree of misinformation among the general public about the nature of the condition and also because the sheer breadth of information about OAB is significant enough that it can result in confusion.
In an effort to make it easier for patients to understand OAB and what it means for them, we sought to condense and simplify the Care Continuum by breaking it into a series of small, easily understood segments, each representing a stop along the OAB treatment pathway.
The result of this effort was a set of 6 videos that brought the Care Continuum to life in an engaging way. By presenting the information in a concise, straightforward style and by using a chaptered approach that broke information into manageable segments, we hoped to provide those with OAB a firmer grasp of the wide variety of treatment options available to them.
Program Development and Execution
Each of the 6 videos NAFC developed to illustrate the OAB Care Continuum focused on a single facet of treatment (titles below are clickable links):
- A Care Continuum overview
- Management through behavior modification
- Bladder control products
- Medications and injections
- Advanced therapies
- Surgical options
Each video was presented using a friendly, inviting whiteboard format and a relaxed, well-paced voice over to convey our message in a way that viewers of all backgrounds could understand. Our goal was to inform without overwhelming, and we emphasized the use of everyday language and uncomplicated line drawings to do so.
The complete campaign was rolled out on our website in the fall of 2018 and supported through a series of of emails and social media posts during Bladder Health Awareness Month, November 2018.
RESULTS
NAFC reached 20,000 people with our videos through social media, and these videos have been watched more than 6,000 times on social media and YouTube.
In addition to the education that these videos provided on their own, they also drove considerable traffic to the OAB section of our website, where a more detailed discussion of the condition is available. In fact, following the launch of our video campaign, our OAB section saw a nearly 80% jump in traffic.
