Using Digital Stories in Clinician Training
Digital storytelling in healthcare is more than a creative add-on. It is a practical, evidence-informed way to bring patient and family voice into clinician education, medical conferences, and training programs. A digital story is a short film built with a trained facilitator, combining voiceover narration with personal photos and simple video editing to capture a meaningful moment. When you embed one strong story into a learning space, it can do what journal articles often cannot: create emotional clarity, deepen empathy, and prompt better questions. That protected pause for reflection helps clinicians notice their assumptions and enter future conversations with more humility and sensitivity, especially in pediatrics and complex care.
Digital Stories Belong in Curriculum & Communities
Digital storytelling is having a quiet breakthrough in health and wellness, and this conversation shows what it looks like when the work finally meets the moment. Dr. Mike Lang shares how he went from having to justify why stories matter in healthcare to embedding digital stories directly into a University of Calgary nursing curriculum. In nursing education, narrative learning is not fluff, it is clinical preparation. First-person storytelling helps students grasp identity, ethics, and the human stakes behind care decisions. When digital storytelling is treated as a core learning tool, it strengthens empathy, reflection, communication, and patient-centred practice in ways a lecture rarely can.
What Changes When We Treat Stories Like Data
Digital storytelling is a short, carefully made film that combines voiceover narration, personal images, and simple video editing to capture a meaningful moment in someone’s life. In healthcare communication, that format does something rare: it creates emotional clarity fast. A story that lasts only a few minutes can move a room from polite listening to honest conversation, because it lowers defenses and makes vulnerability feel possible. For clinicians, patients, and families, these short films can become a powerful tool for patient experience, physician wellness, and health education, especially when traditional presentations feel too abstract or too slow to reach what matters.
Through Her Lens: Cameras For Girls
Digital storytelling sounds simple until you try to compress a life into a few minutes. A digital story is a short film built with a trained facilitator using voiceover, personal images, and careful video editing, but the real work is deciding what matters most. In this conversation, founder Amina Mohamed and host Kristy Wolfe show how a tight format creates clarity, turning a long origin narrative into a piece that feels three-dimensional and emotionally true. For nonprofits, digital storytelling becomes a durable communication tool: it can live on a website, travel on social media, and anchor donor conversations without forcing the founder to repeat the same pitch forever.
Double the Magic: Storytelling for Healing and Impact
Digital storytelling is a simple idea with outsized impact: a short, crafted film built from a person’s voiceover, personal photos, and careful editing to capture a meaningful moment. In this conversation, we explore how that format creates emotional truth without needing spectacle, and why it works so well in health and wellness settings. As a digital storytelling facilitator, Melody Williamson describes how the process helps people feel seen and heard, especially when their experiences are usually private or overlooked.
When Science Meets Story: Lessons from a PhD Defense
Digital storytelling is often described as a short film with voiceover, personal images, and careful editing, but its real power is how it helps people make meaning. When the topic is antimicrobial resistance (AMR) or antibiotic resistance, meaning matters because the public rarely experiences “resistance” as a clear event. In this conversation, we explore how a PhD can sit at the intersection of arts-based methods and biomedical research, and why that hybrid creates both opportunity and friction. For health communication, patient stories can create empathy and memory, yet they still need structure, context, and timing to become true knowledge mobilization.
Health Promoting Experiences of Storytellers: A Meta-Synthesis of Qualitative Studies
Digital storytelling in healthcare is often described as a creative tool, but the deeper value is how it reshapes meaning. In this conversation, midwife and PhD candidate Jonathan Dominguez Hernandez explains why he turned to digital storytelling research to better understand fear of childbirth and other vulnerable health experiences. He traces his path from pediatric nursing in Spain to midwifery training in the UK, then into academia in Switzerland, where he observes how fear, stigma, and professional culture influence health.
Isolation to Impact: DST in Cancer Care
Stories change systems because they change people. That truth sits at the heart of our conversation with Jack Bones, a transgender cancer survivor who used digital storytelling to transform a personal ordeal into a tool for empathy and training within healthcare. Jack’s journey began with a politicized identity, a late-stage diagnosis, and a decision to speak even when silence felt safer. In the workshop, Jack distilled a broad call for systemic change into one vivid moment: a biopsy appointment where bias met resistance, and a single act of human connection shifted everything. By focusing on a specific scene rather than an abstract argument, the story invites viewers to feel the stakes of dignity in care and to see how small gestures can influence life-or-death decisions. It’s advocacy through intimacy, and it works.
The Storyteller’s Yellow Pages
Personhood can get lost in healthcare. Files pile up, acronyms multiply, and the human at the centre becomes a collection of notes and tasks. Our conversation with Common Language DST facilitator Lisa Joworski, focuses on a simple counterweight: stories. We talk about short, meaningful videos, guided autobiography, podcasts, and even tattoos and scars as entry points to identity. The aim is not art for art’s sake; it is care that sees the whole person. When a nurse, aide, or physician has even a two-minute window into someone’s essence, decisions soften, empathy rises, and communication improves. That is the promise—and the practice—of capturing essence for care.
Neurodevelopment, Advocacy & Heart Families
The throughline of this conversation is simple and urgent: Congenital Heart Disease is not only about hearts. It is about brains, emotions, classrooms, and families learning a new language overnight. We open with the “Kitchen Table” idea—stories as living wisdom that bridges facts and life. That frame matters because parents are drowning in information yet starving for guidance. Digital storytelling gives shape to experience, turning scattered moments into a map others can follow. Across three parent narratives and two organizations, we hear the same plea: translate neurodevelopment research into everyday help, and do it early, locally, and with compassion.
Shame, Story, & Healing in Medicine
Shame is both a wound and a bridge in healthcare. It cuts when a clinician makes an error, falters under workload, or feels like an imposter. It also connects providers when a hard truth is spoken aloud and answered with empathy. In this conversation, family physician and Shame Lab co-founder Dr. Will Bynum joins host Kristy Wolfe and cardiologist Dr. Daisy Dulay to explore how medicine’s culture interacts with shame, and why digital storytelling can transform private distress into collective learning. They trace the arc from an adverse event to language, from silence to community, and from pain to practice change. Along the way, they show how shame shapes identity, performance, and patient safety—and how naming it begins to soften its hold.
Resilience Stories in Vet Education
Digital stories are short, crafted films that blend voiceover, personal images, and intentional editing to capture a meaningful moment. This episode explores how those stories move beyond memorial slideshows and into tools for care, education, and resilience. Angie Turner, a veterinary technician and legacy specialist guides us through her various storytelling practices. The focus is the human need behind the output: to name hard experiences, set boundaries with content warnings, and share purposefully with an audience that matters. In professional settings, that need is often urgent. Students and clinicians struggle with burnout, grief, and isolation; stories surface truth in a way policy memos never will.
Bridging Lived Experience, Storytelling & Advocacy
Stories are bridges. They carry feeling, context, and meaning across the gaps that data leaves behind. Together with Fabiana Bacchini host of the Canadian Premature Babies Foundation’s Preemie Chats, we explore how digital storytelling turns lived experience from NICU and congenital heart disease into education, advocacy, and healing. Kristy Wolfe, a preemie parent, digital storytelling facilitator, and host of Co-Created shares a deeply personal bedtime ritual that grounds her family’s coping. Simple questions like “What was the best part of your day?” and “What are you grateful for?” become anchors against fear, uncertainty, and the ongoing realities of cardiology appointments and future surgeries. This everyday practice shows how language, curiosity, and presence can shape resilience for caregivers and kids alike.
From Grief to Community: Crafting Meaning After Loss
Grief often arrives without language, stealing both breath and words. That’s why digital storytelling can feel like a handrail in the dark: a short, crafted film pairing voice, images, and music to hold a moment that’s too heavy to carry alone. In this conversation, we explore how a mother, Gillian Hatto, faced the sudden death of her infant Hazel and later the loss of Lily, then found connection through SIDS Calgary Society and ultimately founded Hazel’s Heroes, a nonprofit retreat for bereaved parents.
Story Slam 2026: Where Stories Build Connection
Digital storytelling sits at the crossroads of care, community, and change. In this conversation, we explore how short, voice-led films made with a facilitator help people name hard truths, honour family, and translate experience into practical wisdom. Mike Lang shares recent workshops with young caregivers of parents who had ALS, head and neck cancer patients in Alberta, and young adults living with brain tumours. Each project centres lived experience, turning private struggles into public resources that reduce isolation and spark action. Listeners hear why facilitators value both the stories and the culture that forms when organizations return year after year to create and share them.
Side by Side: Siblings, Disability & Peer Support
Siblings often stand in the background of disability narratives, visible yet rarely centred, present yet seldom asked how the system looks and feels from their vantage point. This conversation with Dr. Linda Nguyen and Samantha Bellefeuille places sibling experience at the core and follows it all the way through the mechanics of research, the ethics of sharing, and the practice of digital storytelling as both a personal process and a public-facing tool.
From Heart Parent to DST Facilitator: Stories of Advocacy
Two years after sharing her first digital story about parenting a child with congenital heart disease, Jen Siran returns to the podcast having transformed from storyteller to facilitator. Her journey exemplifies the ripple effects that personal narratives can create; from publishing a book to securing grant funding (after multiple attempts) to developing Caregiver's Corner, a resource hub featuring digital stories for heart families across Western Canada.
Finding Art: A Life Well Lived
In a world where we often shy away from difficult conversations, "Co-Created" brings us face-to-face with the power of embracing life's most challenging moments through digital storytelling. Host Kristy Wolfe welcomes Dr. Tom Lee, a retired engineering professor with a terminal cancer diagnosis who has transformed his experience into art, community building, and storytelling.
Every Business Starts With a Story That Matters
Digital stories have the power to transform our personal narratives into professional purpose. In our recent podcast episode of Co-Created, mindfulness teacher and keynote speaker Trish Tutton demonstrates this transformation beautifully as she shares how her digital storytelling journey became an essential communication tool for her business.
Facilitation in Action: DST Training Meets Advocacy
Our Co-Created conversation features Katlyn Lamont, a newly trained Common Language digital storytelling facilitator who works as a registered psychotherapist with a youth addictions agency. Her journey into digital storytelling began somewhat unexpectedly – she was offered a last-minute spot in a training workshop and found herself reconnecting with her high school media production skills. What's remarkable about Katlyn's experience is how quickly she discovered the transformative potential of this medium, both for herself and her community.