CLIENT BRIEF
The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) developed a new Remote, Rural and Regional Professional Skills Course to help build the core skills surgeons need to care for people living in rural, regional and remote communities across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.
Free, online and available on demand, the course was designed to provide flexible, self-paced learning across all nine surgical specialties.
With more than 200 surgeons, trainees, clinicians and medical educators contributing to the development of the curriculum and course, RACS needed a video production approach capable of bringing together expertise and perspectives from health professionals located across the country.
Our role was to work with the RACS team across development and production, travelling nationally to capture interviews and specialist insights that could become an integral part of the online learning experience.
Importantly, the content needed to do more than explain the course. It needed to help translate professional knowledge and real-world experience into engaging video resources that could be used throughout the learning platform.
OUR APPROACH
Working as a small and agile production team, we travelled across Australia to interview surgeons and other health professionals with direct experience of delivering care in rural, regional and remote settings.
The production covered a broad range of topics central to the course, including rural professional practice, contextual decision-making, virtual healthcare, outreach and locum practice, and collaborative care across geographically dispersed teams.
Rather than approaching these interviews as standalone pieces, we worked with RACS during development to consider how each conversation could contribute to the wider learning experience.
The interviews captured professional insights, contemporary case studies, reflections and practical advice. This gave RACS authentic, experience-led material that could sit alongside the formal course content and help participants connect what they were learning with situations encountered in real clinical practice.
Once production was complete, the next challenge was transforming a significant volume of interview material into content that worked within an online learning environment.
We created a series of shorter, focused video modules around individual topics and themes. This allowed relevant perspectives from different contributors to be brought together and embedded at appropriate points throughout the course.
Instead of asking participants to consume long interviews, the content could be delivered in more focused sections – providing the right insight at the point in the learning journey where it was most relevant.
CREATING CONTENT FOR DIFFERENT AUDIENCES
The same production also became the foundation for the course’s promotional campaign.
The RACS course was designed for a diverse audience – from trainees and supervisors through to subspecialist surgeons, internationally trained specialists and prevocational doctors.
Each group had different reasons for engaging with the course.
Using the interviews and course material captured during production, we were able to create multiple versions of the promotional video with messaging tailored to these different professional roles.
For trainees, the emphasis could be on developing the confidence and skills required to make the most of rural training opportunities.
For supervisors, the message focused on how a structured learning program could complement practical experience and hands-on supervision.
For subspecialist surgeons, the content highlighted the opportunity to improve access to specialist knowledge regardless of where patients live, while internationally trained specialists could be introduced to rural community context, health systems, culture and models of healthcare delivery in Australia and New Zealand.
This approach meant RACS didn’t need to create an entirely separate campaign for every audience. A carefully planned production provided the flexibility to reshape the core story and make it relevant to the health professional viewing it.
OUTCOME
The result was much more than a single promotional video.
One coordinated production created a library of specialist video content that could be used throughout the RACS learning platform, broken into shorter modules around specific course topics and repurposed into multiple promotional versions for different professional audiences.
It gave RACS the ability to combine structured learning with the voices and real-world experiences of health professionals working across different locations and contexts.
It also demonstrated the value of considering content strategy from the beginning of a video project.
By understanding how the footage would ultimately be used – within individual learning modules, as part of the wider course and in external promotion – we could capture and structure the material to work across all of those applications.
For RACS, that meant one national production became a flexible collection of educational and promotional assets, helping specialist knowledge travel far beyond the locations where it was originally filmed.
