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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 ...
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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,...
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When the negative politics of Stormont contaminate the positive framing of news about organ donation

Recent coverage of organ donation in Northern Ireland has been merging during several weeks with the political paralysis of the country's assembly  that started in May last year . In a nutshell, Northern Ireland Assembly's has not convened to agree the final steps needed to implement the   opt-out law for organ donation from spring 2023 . While the UK Parliament is now going to make  an exceptional intervention  so the law can be enacted, the entanglement with a fully unrelated conflict that  stems from Brexit  holds in my view valuable lessons to reflect on how organ donation is discussed in today's media landscape. As suggested  in a previous post , mainstream news about organ donation have increasingly involved families making some form of political pressure (or activism?) so opt-out frameworks for organ donation are implemented.  The coverage had provided welcome photo opportunities for politicians.  Organ donation moves into the dar...
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