Communicating health

Mainstream news coverage of organ donation in the UK tends to emphasise the cases of families calling for the implementation of opt-out systems as a solution to the well-known problem of organ shortages  and the long waiting lists endured by people with organ failure. A recurrent frame in the coverage involves children and their parents campaigning for presumed consent laws to be enacted by politicians. Well-known cases are captured in documentaries such as BBC Two's Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live , which was broadcast in May 2018 as the "Max Johnson and Keira Ball Law". This case had received significant levels of public attention, underpinned by The Mirror 's campaign to change organ donation law in England.  Broadcaster ITV has also been a fundamental provider of news content that promotes the opt-out system, visible in cases such as little  Dáithí MacGabhann and Georgia Kirchin , to mention a few.  Understandably, the families involved tend to express high ...

The fear and sense of wasting precious time is a common experience among patients with organ failure. This is clear when one follows accounts of people on the waiting list in documentaries such as #GeordieHospital (Channel 4), Heart Transplant: A Chance to Live (BBC2) and Gift of Life (Channel 5). I am lucky that all my organs appear to work properly for now but these documentaries have given me a bit of an education on the subject and sensitised me to the challenges that patients, their families, clinical and medical carers go through.  In my reading to improve my understanding of the subject, I've come across the concept of "status passage" as one that helps to explain the transitional nature of living with kidney failure. Having interviewed 50 patients and 14 health professionals in two healtchare facilities in Buenos Aires, Roberti, Alonso, Blas and May identified three main transitions between early stages of kidney disease and failure to dialysis after graft fai...