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...

(Gabriel Moreno) - In words of The Washington Post writers , David Bennett became 'a medical pioneer' after the heart of a genetically modified pig was used to replace his failing heart. But the significance of this medical breakthrough in which he had been involved was eclipsed by the fact he 'had been convicted in 1988' after stabbing a man seven times. Attention grabbing as Johnson and Wan's article is, the so called 'ethics of a second chance' angle it deploys belongs within a category of public discourse that has taxed the ability of societies to deal with the organ shortage crisis  all over the world. For several decades, medical and social scientists have known that news media are one of the most effective forms of public education interventions to reduce the shortage of organs for patients who need a transplant for a shot at carrying on with their lives.  As put by Rafael Matesanz , architect of Spain's renowned national system of transplantation...

(Gabriel Moreno) - In this post I discuss a line of inquiry I have been following with a colleague that focuses on the public communication of organ transplantation. What is public communication will be contentious in the age of post-truth politics, but the meaning of organ transplantation is unequivocal and therefore easier to identify in terms of its public discussion. Organ transplantation, simply put, involves the replacement of a vital internal component in a person’s body, due to a malfunction of the organ involved that is life-threatening.  Even this rather basic definition can be problematic since the notion of replacing a body component can trigger ideas about the existence of a market for body organs that feeds misconceptions about how the systems of allocation for organs function in health systems. We will keep it for now so for operative purposes, no pun intended, in order to explain how my plan to investigate the “public communication of organ transplantation and organ...

Organ transplants: why so many people are put off donating irinabdw/Shutterstock (I'm republishing this article from The Conversation partly as an opportunity to acknowledge the progress that the UK has made towards reducing the number of cases in which families refuse to donate the organs of loved ones after they die. With the consent/authorisation rate going up 2% in 2018/19 to 67%, the country is much closer to the 80% target that would dramatically improve transplant outcomes, per the latest   Organ Donation and Transplantation Activity Report . But there is more work to be done) Gabriel Moreno Esparza , Northumbria University, Newcastle and Stephen Clark , Northumbria University, Newcastle It’s well known that there’s a worldwide shortage of organ donors. More than 100,000 organ transplants have taken place around the world every year since 2008 but this is way below what’s needed . In the UK , for example, fi...

This year, the so called  law of presumed consent in organ donation will enter into force in Scotland and England. If you are an adult and not within an excluded group, your main organs maybe retrieved after you die and, if deemed suitable, used for a person on the organ waiting list. This, unless you had previously expressed your decision to opt out of the Organ Donor Register. Moving to an opt out system is significant because it usually helps to increase the pool of organs available for donation, as illustrated by the Welsh case  and many other examples in the world.  I am starting this blog to reflect on the various forms of communication that will stem from the new legal framework. Since I started researching the subject in February last year, I have become familiar with the various ways in which communication media impinge upon public knowledge and attitudes about organ donation. I therefore intend to write commentary about coverage in the news media, content...