Fiction series produced by i3S wins Sustainable Health Award

The first fiction series on Health education made in Portugal - “2′ Minutes to Change Life” - produced by the Health Research and Innovation Institute of the University of Porto (i3S) and by Ipatimup, in partnership with the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation, recently won the 10th edition of the Sustainable Health Award in the category “Health promotion and disease prevention”. This award, which is the result of an initiative by Sanofi and Jornal de Negócios, in partnership with NTT Data, has the mission of contributing to the recognition and sharing of the best that is done for national health.

Nuno Teixeira Marcos, coordinator of the Ipatimup Cancer Prevention Unit, says that “it is a source of great pride and satisfaction that a health sustainability award has chosen a cancer prevention project, which is so often relegated to the background in the overview of disease management, despite being the most important strategy we have to manage cancer disease and all its societal implications”.

For the authors of the format, Nuno Teixeira Marcos, Luís Carvalho, Nuno Ribeiro and Paulo Gomes, these awards “are immensely rewarding, especially when the jury, made up of great figures linked to national health, shares the project's vision”.

The project had already won the Ciência Viva Prize in 2020, two Telly Awards, the Special Prize of the Juri Casa das Ciências 2020 and a nomination for the main prize of the MEDEA Awards 2020, having won the Public Award. After having already been selected as one of the seven finalists of the 1st edition of the Health for All Film Festival (2020), created by the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2021 it will be present at the Science Film Festival, the largest scientific film festival in the world, with the airing of 3 episodes in Angola, Mozambique, Kenya, Thailand and Indonesia between October and December.

The series, consisting of 20 episodes, was broadcast in 2019 on RTP1 during prime time, and was part of a multi-platform campaign (delivered via television, web, mobile, face-to-face sessions and classroom) of health education that promotes changes in health behavior within the reach of everyone to prevent non-communicable diseases. In terms of audiences, the numbers are also promising: more than three million viewers have seen the episodes.
 
Two years after its premiere and with an additional soundtrack, the project is still alive on social networks and is in demand by the public. Posts on Facebook and Instagram have reached more than two million people and videos on Youtube, RTP Play, on the App and it’s website have been viewed more than 94 thousand times. The team also created a pedagogical kit for teachers to work with children on health topics in the classroom, and which has already had more than 13,500 downloads.

The last phase of the campaign will bring to national schools a new online course on health promotion and cancer prevention, providing students with additional explanatory and discussion videos on prevention topics, quizzes, and practical activities.
 
The “2′ Minutes to Change Life” campaign had as its main partner the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation, RTP as the media partner, and the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the “la Caixa” Foundation.