Communicating health

As the UK grapples with the resurgence of whooping cough, it becomes increasingly important for public health messaging to adopt a nuanced and multi-strategy approach to vaccination appeals. In recent weeks, the UK has witnessed a notable surge in whooping cough cases, a severe infection particularly dangerous to children and pregnant women. Public health messaging has strongly emphasized vaccination as a crucial measure to combat this infection. Naturally, this is the case in the official communication of the UK Health Security Agency. BBC's coverage highlights worrying rise of cases However, a quick examination of the mainstream media coverage reveals what could be described as a hesitancy to include direct vaccination appeals, as can be surmised from a BBC’s report  which emphasized the threatening aspect, and a local news report which highlighted its regional spread . While mentioning a decline in vaccination rates, the coverage avoided direct calls to vaccinate and mere...

I have in recent weeks been preparing for a study about Channel4's  television series  Geordie Hospital, which was on air last year and triggered a wave of activity on Twitter with the #GeordieHospital hashtag (#GH).  #GH was filmed in NHS hospitals in the UK and widely tweeted as the country was recovering a modicum of normality after the Covid-19 lockdowns. This illustrates the importance that communication has for healthcare providers and arguably for everyone who is a stakeholder in public health outcomes today.  Channel 4's TV series was filmed in hospitals in Newcastle upon Tyne GH is valuable to explore processes of biomedicalization,  described by Briggs and Hallin  as 'the greater interpenetration of biomedicine into other social structures, such as industry, the state, and the mass media'.  Why study a medical show and its tweets? Big concepts such as biomedicalization don't readily convey the importance of researching medical t...