For embecta’s global PWD Storytelling Series, I led the editorial development of 11 stories featuring people living with diabetes (PWDs) across the U.S., China, Japan, Sweden, and Mexico.
There were no neat scripts waiting to be polished. There were hours of interview footage and transcripts—and somewhere inside each of them, a story.
My job was to find it.
I reviewed the raw interviews, identified the moments and themes that revealed who each person was, and shaped those pieces into individual narratives. Then I created detailed paper edits with dialogue, timestamps, screenshots, and visual direction that gave our video editors a roadmap for bringing each story to life.
My role
Creative & editorial lead · story development · narrative direction · paper edits · video scripting · web content
Deliverables
11 patient stories · video content · web content · individual story pages
The challenge
Create a global series that still felt deeply personal.
Patient storytelling can easily become formulaic. The challenge was finding the emotional center of each person’s experience without forcing 11 very different lives into the same narrative—and doing it across cultures, countries, and perspectives.
Each story needed to stand on its own. Together, they needed to feel unmistakably embecta.
Finding the story inside the story
Rather than focusing solely on diabetes management, the series looked at the lives surrounding it: the people, passions, relationships, ambitions, frustrations, and everyday moments that make each person’s experience their own.
That meant identifying what was distinctive about every participant and allowing their personality—not the brand—to lead the story.
11 voices. 11 perspectives
Making room for individual voices
The stories ranged across cultures and circumstances, but the creative approach remained consistent: listen first, find the human truth, and let each person’s experience shape the narrative.
The goal wasn’t to create 11 versions of the same diabetes story. It was to create a framework flexible enough to hold 11 different ones.
Extending the stories digitally
The videos live within a dedicated experience on embecta’s website, with individual landing pages that allow visitors to explore each person’s story and connected storytelling with practical diabetes education and injection resources.
The power of listening
The strongest patient stories aren’t really about a condition. They’re about identity, family, independence, fear, humor, ambition, frustration—and all the other things that continue happening while someone happens to be living with diabetes.
Across 11 people and five countries, the PWD Storytelling Series gave embecta a way to talk about diabetes through the people who understand it best: the people living it.
Sara Barton 
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