Case Study: EMERGENCY!
North Sydney Area Health Service
In 2003 the ANAEI asked Twoshotmedia to create a video that would teach nurses how to act in an emergency situation. Entitled “Assessment of the Critically Ill Patient” and 6 minutes long, the video showed how staff should react to a variety of emergencies that might occur for patients. It was time-critical – the client needed the video to be completed in two weeks!
For the sake of realism we filmed on the ward at the Royal North Shore Hospital, so of course it was important that we were as quiet and respectful as possible. Our motto at Twoshotmedia is that a happy crew is a hardworking crew, so our people are normally quite ebullient. This time, though, we were as quiet as mice while we worked so as not to disturb the patients.
We used nursing staff members to act as patients for the video, as we felt that actors may not necessarily be able to effectively reproduce the seriousness of the emergency situations in the timeframe and budget that we had. We gave our on-camera volunteers some basic media training, and they shone! The whole shoot took less than a day, and the edit was completed by the end of the week.
The client was extremely happy with the final video, and it was used to great effect in the training sessions conducted for students later that month. The support staff also got a kick out of seeing their colleagues on camera, and we hear the video had a second life at the annual staff Christmas party!