On how the transitional nature of organ failure is captured in television and clinical research

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 failure.

Screenshot of transitional moments that cause fear and anxiety for people with kidney failure

For various reasons, TV documentaries could not possibly reflect on experiences of organ failure with the detail that a journal article can. But they illustrate such challenges as the anxiety of individuals waiting to be told if a matching organ will be offered to them.

Or consider the trepidation of a patient (captured in film) who hugs a relative good bye before being wheeled on a stretcher to an operating theatre, having received an organ offer, with the knowledge they may never see their loved ones again. These are all micro moments within the status passages researchers describe.

Comments

Rethinking Blood Donation: The Economics, Messaging, and Challenges

Blood transfusion is a critical medical procedure, yet the approach to securing a safe and sufficient blood supply involves complex economic, communicative, and logistical challenges which are difficult to understand when the messaging around it is haunted by catastrophic precedent such as the one that destroyed the lives of thousands in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Reflecting on these aspects reveals the importance of treating blood as a public good , rather than a commodity, central to preventing future crises like the one the news media will abundantly be reflecting when findings from the Infected Blood Inquiry are finally published. The Power of Messaging in Blood Donation Campaigns Effective communication in blood donation campaigns is crucial to ensuring a stable blood supply. Research indicates that the nature of these messages significantly influences public perception and willingness to donate. Traditional slogans like "Save Lives" are common, but recent studies ...

Decoding NHS’s tweets with speech act theory and the encoding/decoding model

In the era of social media, organizations like the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust are leveraging platforms like Twitter to communicate with publics in multifaceted ways. A fascinating case in point is how the NHS trust used Twitter to communicate about #GeordieHospital, a documentary series filmed on various of its premises and broadcast on Channel 4. Analysing these tweets through the lens of speech act theory is a fascinating if laborious task which is of value to tackle one of the many challenges of understanding human communication in the digital age. NHS digital speech acts are multifunctional ( created via OpenArt ) Breaking tweets into speech acts Speech act theory, a cornerstone of linguistic philosophy, breaks down communication into three types of acts: locutionary (the act of saying something), illocutionary (the intent behind saying something), and perlocutionary (the effect of saying something). In the context of the NHS trust's tweets,...

When multimodal speech speaks a thousand images and words

In today's communication landscape, multimodal speech, based on text, emojis, links, pictures and more arguably augments the nature of our messages As part of a literature review I've been working on the use of speech acts on social media, I came across the distinction that authors of a study make between "Speech and Image Acts" in branding messages on social media. Having for sometime settled for the idea that speech acts are multimodal in today's hybrid polymedia system, I wander whether the need to distinguish between speech and image acts is necessary. Multimodal speaks a thousand images and words: replacing the old adage (Created with ChatGPT) The way we communicate online defies simple categorization. A single social media post can be a demand, a plea, an informative statement, and a source of visual delight – all at once. Does it make sense, then, to stick with the traditional distinction between "speech acts" (focused on words) and "imag...

Communicating health

Search This Blog