It was always healthcare

After producing hundreds of videos over the years, I found myself asking a question I probably should've asked sooner: which projects have brought me the most joy?

Without hesitation, it's the work I've done in the health space.

Organisations like Starship Foundation, Glaucoma NZ, and Health Navigator. Organisations dedicated, in some way or another, to improving people's lives. I've been drawn to this kind of work for as long as I can remember. I've always been fascinated by the human body, by medicine, by the people who devote their careers to helping others - whether that's through treatment, research, advocacy, or education. There's something that happens when I'm in those environments, I care differently. I show up differently.

So I decided to stop treating that as a happy accident and start treating it as a direction.

What it actually looks like.

Last year, I filmed on a children's cancer ward for Starship Foundation.

I want to be careful about how I describe this, because it wasn't dramatic in the way you might imagine. It was quiet. Children in beds. Parents sitting beside them, trying to hold it together. Nurses moving through the space with a kind of calm that only comes from doing something hard, every day, for a long time.

My job was to be in that room without disturbing it. To find the moments that were true — not staged, not performed — and to capture them in a way that would let someone watching from a fundraising gala feel what it was like to be there. To close the distance between the donor and the child.

That requires a very particular set of skills. You have to manage your own emotions while staying technically sharp. You have to read a room that has its own rhythms and protocols. You have to earn the trust of people who are, in the most literal sense, having the worst time of their lives — and you have to do it quickly, and quietly, without making it about you.

I've spent 10+ years learning how to do exactly that.

The video played at Starship's gala dinner. They raised an extraordinary amount of money that night. I don't take credit for that — the families who shared their stories are the ones who moved the room. But I know that a well-crafted piece of storytelling, one with the right structure and emotional truth, creates the conditions for those moments to land.

That's what I do. And in healthcare, it matters more than anywhere else I've worked.

Why strategy makes this more powerful, not less.

There's a version of healthcare video that's all heart and no structure. You see it a lot — long, raw, earnest content that means everything to the people who made it and lands quietly on the people it was meant to reach.

Heart isn't enough on its own. You also need to know why you're telling this particular story, who you're telling it to, what you want them to feel, and what you want them to do next. You need to think about consent and sensitivity and what it costs someone to share their hardest moments with a camera. You need a plan.

The thing I've realised is that bringing a strategic brain to healthcare storytelling doesn't make it colder. It makes it more effective. It means the families who gave something of themselves to be in your video actually get the outcome they were hoping for — more donations, more awareness, more change.

That combination of empathy and strategy is where I think I can do my best work.

Why now?

We're in an era where AI can produce content at a volume and speed that wasn't possible even a few years ago. That's not a bad thing — but it does shift what matters. The content that will cut through isn't the content that's fastest or cheapest. It's the content that's most human. The story that makes someone stop scrolling because they recognise something true in it.

Healthcare is full of those stories. They're in every ward, every waiting room, every consultation room where a doctor delivers news that changes someone's life. Most of them go untold, or get told badly, by people without the skills or the stomach for it.

I want to change that.

If you work in a healthcare organisation — whether you're in comms, fundraising, leadership, or somewhere in between — and you've been wondering how to tell the stories you're sitting on, I'd love to talk.

This is the work I'm here to do.

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Notes from Set is my monthly newsletter — real projects, honest reflections, and practical thinking about healthcare storytelling and video strategy. No corporate speak, no hard sell.