Dr Vishaal Virani, Head of Health at YouTube, UK & Ireland talks to Rob Mackinlay about health content on YouTube, and the role that librarians can play in navigating individuals towards it, ahead of the CILIP Conference on 10 and 11 July. Book your place now.

WITH more than three billion views of YouTube health videos in the UK in 2022, the platform has carved itself a role in the nation’s health information landscape and is increasingly focused on maintaining and building public confidence in its health content.

Speaking to Information Professional ahead of CILIP Conference 2024, where he will take part in the ‘Supporting Health and Digital Literacy’ session, Vishaal said: “Libraries and librarians are an important potential audience because of the role they play in directing people to relevant and credible information, and how accessible they are to the public in their local communities, just like YouTube. People might also want to access YouTube through a library because they don’t have access to the internet at home, or they don’t know how to navigate to the right information online. So, it would be useful to empower librarians with the knowledge of what sort of health content is available on YouTube and how to navigate it.”

Vishaal said: “The YouTube health initiative kicked off a few years ago to make it easier for viewers to access authoritative health information on YouTube. The way the YouTube Health features work is that if you search for any health topic on the platform, you’ll see a shelf labelled ‘from health sources’ near the top of the search results which specifically contains videos coming from authoritative sources – that’s how we try and make it clear to the viewers which are credible sources on the platform.”

As well as this drive for greater authority, the accessibility and inclusiveness of the content is also an area of interest. Vishaal said: “I work very closely with a range of different partners in the UK who create health content – NHS organisations, health charities and individual clinicians – to make that content as engaging as possible.”

Vishaal points out that content still needs to be relevant and engaging, saying: “This includes hitting the topic areas that our viewers are searching for. We definitely spend a lot of time identifying where the relative gaps are in our content across health topics. But they are being plugged very quickly as we get more organisations and individuals from the health ecosystem creating content.”

He adds: “The NHS website could probably claim to cover every single condition but where YouTube content is valuable, is in covering topics in a way that is accessible, digestible and easy to understand for individuals.

“The value we provide is around having tailored content for different cultures, languages, reading ages and learning styles. From that point of view, I think we are covering a lot of the gaps in the conventional health literature. I think that the lived experiences content we have on the platform is not necessarily available on the NHS website or elsewhere – and that’s a way of bringing a condition or treatment to life that is very difficult to do with a patient leaflet.”

“There’s a whole spectrum of motives [for using YouTube health content],” Vishaal explains. “A lot of healthy people are searching for preventative health information such as ‘how do I exercise to prevent high blood pressure?’ or ‘how to exercise to prevent diabetes?’ We also see queries such as ‘I’ve been told to have a certain procedure by my doctor. My doctor did explain it in the consult and gave me a leaflet, but I would like to explore it in more detail because there’s a limit to how much I can learn in 10 minutes’.”

But he added: “Many people are also going onto YouTube to learn about a chronic disease, because 99 per cent of the time you manage chronic diseases on your own, outside of the clinic setting. So there’s only so much a clinician can do. The emphasis is then on what you can do to look after yourself and there is a lot of supportive content on YouTube about chronic disease.”

Growing public awareness of specific issues can also drive interest, according to Vishaal: “I would say mental health topics are amongst the most commonly searched health topics on the platform. It’s very dynamic, but in general we’re seeing significant interest in mental health topics, as we’ve seen higher prevalence of mental health issues amongst the general population in the pandemic and post-pandemic.”

Vishaal adds that YouTube already has a role to play in many aspects of librarianship and raising awareness of content to broader audiences: “In academic and public libraries another factor is Open Access to medical journals. Increasingly, medical journals are creating bite-sized videos about their publications, but also librarians could assist their users in better understanding a research study which they may have seen but didn’t make much sense of.”

He added that: “Our conversations with CILIP and attending the CILIP conference, is about helping make as many librarians as possible aware of the YouTube health initiative, and the credible health information available on the platform. And also that YouTube is a place you should feel comfortable directing your library visitors to for health information.”

As part of this aim to elevate reliable content, Vishaal is communicating with the library sector and will be one of the panellists for the Supporting Health and Digital Literacy session at this year’s CILIP Conference. Chaired by Debbie Hicks, Creative Director, Read Well Campaign, The Reading Agency, the panel will discuss the role of the librarian in pointing service users towards authoritative health information. With his co-panellist, Sophie Randall the Director of Patient Information Forum, he will consider the relationship between health and digital literacy and the work that ‘big tech’ platforms, in partnership with clinicians and content creators, are doing to increase access and awareness of authoritative information online.

Taking place on 10 and 11 July and returning to Birmingham, the UK’s only cross-sector event for library, information and knowledge management professionals and leaders, is an opportunity to come together as a community, build connections and strengthen networks. Book your place at CILIP Conference 2024.