Call for Artist

A George Washington Medical School student,  Rahul Vanjani, is looking to hire an artist familiar with medical themes for, as he writes,

“a health literacy project that I am working on with a local non-profit organization here in D.C. We’re in need of an artist(s) for the project and I was wondering if you might be able to send our information out to your network of comic (and non-comic) artists. An artist who works in or who is familiar with the health care field would be preferable. We will pay the artist for his/her services.

Briefly, our current project is focusing on developing a series of standardized health education tools that help visually convey complex topics to low literacy patients, both here in the U.S. and abroad. This project stems from the fact that health care providers in low literacy areas rely heavily on their words and as a result are not often able to clearly convey a complex medical topic. Words are confusing and auditory speech is not the best learning medium for all people. Our goal, therefore, is to create a high quality educational tool that the provider can use to supplement his/her message. In addition, we would like the tools to be so simple that patients can understand the topics even without the assistance of a health care professional. We are focusing on breast feeding as our pilot project…

The tricky part about this project is that we want to minimize the use of words, so we will need to be extremely creative with our pictures so that they are able to adequately convey complex topics, like the importance of not forcing the nipple in the babies mouth but rather using a reflex to help the baby latch more naturally. We hope to brainstorm a bit with the artist before beginning the illustrations.”