Media and Medicine for Communities was established in 2002 to improve health and development of vulnerable communities by: 1) Building partnerships between medical, media, and community organizations and leaders; 2) Conducting research and evaluation on the impact of media and communication; 3) Providing training for leaders interested in working in the medicine-media-community interface.

MMC takes advantage of the unique strengths of the health services research and evaluation environment at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and at RAND, a major nonprofit think tank that conducts policy research in the public interest. Further, MMC involves faculty in the UCLA Schools of Public Health, Communication, Media Design, and the UCLA Film School. MMC is directed by three physicians with a strong interest in the use of media to promote health: Director Kenneth B. Wells, M.D., M.P.H., a psychiatrist and health services researcher; and Assistant Director Bowen Chung, M.D., a child psychiatrist. One of our key media advisors, physician-filmmaker Gretchen Berland, was awarded a 2004 MacArthur fellowship for her work.

MMC has a strong board of advisors and community partners, including representatives of the local entertainment media leadership, community leaders, and administrators responsible for educational television programming in local schools. MMC has also been serving as a training ground for physicians and faculty transitioning into this field.

In addition, MMC is affiliated with the UCLA/RAND NIMH Center for Research on Quality in Managed Care. The Research Center supports work to improve quality of care across healthcare systems as well as for diverse community populations, with a strong focus on reducing ethnic disparities in quality of mental health care across the lifespan, and in particular on ADHD, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder in children, and schizophrenia. The Research Center has established relationships with diverse healthcare and community partners, including Healthy African American Families, QueensCare Faith Health Network, Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, and other programs serving minority populations. These partners provide a rich infrastructure for studying the impact of media programs on mental health and healthrelated behaviors in the communities these organizations serve.

Types of initiatives MMC can support include studying the effects of media programming through community focus groups, viewer surveys, websites that solicit ongoing reactions by viewers, or film screenings with pre- and post-evaluations. For example:

Dr. Neal Baer, MMC board member and former producer and writer of the show “ER,” collaborated in a national survey examining the effects of an episode of “ER” on the viewing public’s knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases. They found that knowledge improved following the episode, but that this effect only lasted for a month. The findings were published in Health Affairs, a policy-oriented scientific publication, and presented at the Institute of Medicine.

MMC researcher Rebecca Collins (RAND) used a national survey of adolescents to show that adolescents retained information about the proper uses of condoms up to 6 months after viewing an episode of the sitcom “Friends” that dealt with that subject. The findings were published in the medical journal Pediatrics.

MMC community empowerment projects examine media-based approaches to empower youth to advocate for healthier eating habits by changing their environments (covered by the Los Angeles Times) and to engage communities of color in understanding and seeking care for depression (presented at the CDC, National Institute of Mental Health, and Institute of Medicine).