I took a break from blogging for the past few months not from lack of interest. In fact my team at ParaPRO has been working on a number of innovative tactics designed to help us dip our toes in the pool of social networking. As an example we released Dr. Itchy to the world a couple of weeks ago. Dr. Itchy is designed to help school nurses teach their students and their student’s parents about head lice. We found that the “average” elementary school nurse sees in excess of 35 cases of head lice each year. Parents, after finding that their child has head lice, are often emotional. Nurses told us they needed a tool to help them explain to parents what lice are, how to get rid of them and, most importantly, not to blame themselves. Kids get lice. It is not the fault of the kid or of the parent.
Dr. Itchy contains a presentation that the nurse can customize and use to explain what lice are. It contains a letter that the nurse can customize and send home with the child. The nurse can send for and receive a Dr. Itchy poster to help them educate their students about lice. We also created a game that parents and students can play to remove lice and nits. If a few nits are left on the head they will hatch into lice that will lay more eggs and create more lice etc. Try it out if/when you get a chance. My 15 year old son played with it for 10 minutes before conquering level 3. I’m still trying to get there.
Question - What should we offer players that conquer level 3? Plz give me your comments.
We also created a companion site at MyHeadLiceTreatment that contains actual photographs of lice, a section on facts and myths about lice and videos to instruct parents how to identify lice and comb for nits. The site also has a tool that will allow a parent to send a message to the parents of their children’s friends (anonymously if they want) to alert them to check their children for lice if an outbreak occurs.
So why are we doing this? Will it help us sell a product? I don’t know. We don’t have a product yet. What we can tell you is that we want to create quality tools that nurses and parents will appreciate and use. If they like what we have hopefully they will tell their friends/peers. We would like for them to tell us what they think so we can improve the tools we do have. Hopefully we can start and maintain a dialog which will lead to less misleading information and better treatment options for patients with head lice.
Isn’t that what social networking is all about. We think so.
Until next time – all the best!
RolandB
BTW – I’m still looking for a backhoe for my friends in Honduras. If you have one laying around in the back yard let me know. :)
