Sandra de Castro Buffington

I moved to Los Angeles from the East Coast over 20 years ago to direct a program called Hollywood Health and Society. My mandate was to build a team and outreach to Hollywood's top writers and producers to inspire them to integrate content around health and well-being into their scripts for TV and movies. I worked with shows like Grey's Anatomy, House MD, and Law & Order Special Victims Unit - you name the TV show, I probably worked with them. I had a partnership with the Writers Guild of America West and started hosting events, panels, and launched a story tour series, taking writers and producers overseas to India and South Africa, and into communities here in LA that they might not visit on their own. The whole idea was to immerse them in real stories of real people to give them inspiration and help them make stories accurate and realistic. I also did research to measure the impact of these stories on audiences through pre- and post-surveys to measure how much people learned, how much it shifted their attitudes, and how much it changed their behavior. For example, an 8-week story arc on 90210 about breast cancer and the BRCA gene resulted in 11.9% of viewers reporting scheduling screening appointments with their doctors. A Grey's Anatomy episode called 'Silent All These Years' about sexual assault led to a 43% increase in calls to the National Sexual Assault Hotline immediately after it aired. Currently, I teach at Harvard Medical School in the master's degree in media and medicine, where I teach empathy and storytelling in health, doing it long distance from Los Angeles.