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Podcast Proves Effective in Educating on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders

New research indicates that tuning into an educational podcast prepares healthcare providers to better screen and educate their patients on the risks of alcohol use during pregnancy.

Podcasts have become a popular form of continuing education for healthcare providers, thanks to their ease of accessibility and broad reach—especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, when in-person training options were limited. A new study from a team of researchers at the School of Public Health, the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine, and Boston Medical Center (BMC) has demonstrated that an educational podcast has the ability to not only build knowledge and self-efficacy among providers, but also positively influence their behaviors to support greater engagement in patient education and health promotion efforts.

Published in November in the journal Pedagogy in Health Promotion, the study showed that among clinical providers who tuned into a medical podcast titled Alcohol and Pregnancy: The More You Know about the adverse health outcomes affecting infants exposed to alcohol while in the womb, more than 85 percent reported they were better able to educate their patients about prenatal alcohol use risk post-podcast. The majority (59.3%) intended to change their practice based on what they learned.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) encompass a group of conditions that can result from exposure to alcohol in utero and include a combination of physical, behavioral, and learning problems. Recent estimates indicate that as many as 1 in 20 U.S. school-aged children might have a FASD, making FASD the most common permanent, yet preventable, intellectual and developmental disability in the country. Screening, intervention, and referral to treatment are therefore widely recommended for all pregnant women to significantly reduce potential alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Unfortunately, given competing demands on providers’ time and attention, adoption of these practices has historically been limited.

“Podcasts have great potential to educate people and promote behavior change, but the extent to which they are effective in doing that is not well known. While it is easy to evaluate listeners’ satisfaction with a podcast, or even an immediate increase in knowledge after listening, assessing changes in behaviors, and in this case, practice change of providers, is more difficult,” says Jacey Greece, study senior author and clinical professor of community health sciences. “Understanding a podcast’s ability to change behavior leverages this communication medium as an essential way to deliver information to a wide range of listeners, educate on a number of important topics that change with emerging research, and do so in a format that engages the listener at a time and place convenient for them.”

After an increase in alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic, the need for providers to address alcohol use with their patients has only become more critical. With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Boston Sustainable Models for Unhealthy Alcohol Use Reduction (B SMART) Program developed the first-known podcast designed to prevent FASDs.

The three-part podcast features interviews with a variety of guests, including a medical expert, a patient advocate, a mother whose child is affected by prenatal alcohol exposure, and a public health social worker with specialized training in alcohol use counseling. The content targeted providers in children- and women-focused medical specialties and offered continuing medical education credit to those who completed the entire series. For those who did not need continuing education credits, the podcast was freely accessible on Apple Podcasts and Spotify,

Using a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the podcast’s efficacy, the researchers surveyed listeners immediately post-podcast to assess their self-reported knowledge, self-efficacy, and intent to change their practices and then, six months later, conducted open-ended focus groups to better understand the changes listeners reported actually implementing and any challenges they encountered in doing so.

“This study showed that an engaging podcast that educated listeners on the most current science, utilized vignettes to deliver information, and offered strategies for practice change not only increased knowledge and self-efficacy immediately following completion of the podcast but, more importantly, changed practice in providers months after listening to the podcast,” says Greece. “It is the practice change that benefits patients and communities and that was the impetus for our exploration and evaluation of the podcast. Impacting behavior change is essential in public health. Translating research and knowledge into actual practice is how we achieve better health in individuals, systems, and communities.”

The study was coauthored by Candice Bangham (SPH ‘19), senior program manager in the Department of Environmental Health; Alyson Codner (SPH‘22); Micaela Kranz (SPH’22); and Xinyang Liu, a current MPH student at SPH, among others from the Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and BMC.