In an effort to spread medical awareness, Diamond Bar High School’s Health Occupations Students of America-Future Health Professionals (HOSA) created a podcast to educate students about common health problems.
They were inspired by their goal to redirect misinformed students and provide up-to-date information about health problems and illnesses. Junior officer Lilia Dahhak and senior officer Raina Oh both felt as though a podcast could introduce the field of STEM to their peers and serve as an outlet to those who are interested.
“We noticed that a lot of people at our school base their habits and routines off of this misinformation spread on social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok,” Dahhak said. “We wanted to create something that could spread correct information to our school in an easily consumable way: a podcast.”
The club produces an episode every month on their Instagram, @dbarhosa. Each episode features people selected from the officer board to meet and discuss topics they plan to cover from their previously planned out list.
“We met during summer to discuss our goals for the year, and we decided a podcast would be an interesting method of communication to integrate into our club,” Dahhak said. “We compiled a list of monthly themes, made a wish list on Amazon to buy things like microphones, and we went from there.”
Despite their officers’ hectic schedules while balancing school, they were dedicated to creating their podcast. They configured the topics by the corresponding awareness month including National Blood Donor Month in January and National Cancer Prevention Month in February
“Many of these themes correspond with awareness weeks or months, such as blood donor month in January,” Dahhak said.
With a variety of episodes online already, they’ve continued to talk about medical and health issues. Episodes revolved around what they believed would be best for the campus at the time, which was decided based on current trends and fads.
“We chose stress awareness in April in particular because we know that DBHS is full of hard working students who would be studying for AP exams and finals around that time,” Oh said.
In the future, HOSA hopes to continue educating their peers and debunk common medical misconceptions. They plan on continuing their podcast to ensure this.
“We hope to inspire DBHS students to stay open minded and to expand their perspective beyond the common myths that places limits on accurately understanding certain conditions,” Oh said. “We also hope that these podcasts can spotlight attention on health related topics that could tug on students’ curiosities.”