Negative Health Service

11 Jul 2008

Advertising diverts attention to the negative side of the health service.

The local NHS has been conducting a major advertising campaign round here lately – here have been posters on buses, phone boxes, and a leaflets drop through the letterbox. Here’s both sides of the leaflet:

NHS leaflet

It’s advertising the fact that you can now choose which hospital you go to. But it does so by implying that some hospitals are no good – on one side, the ginger child in the broken wheelchair says “I will choose a hospital with the lowest superbugs rate”. Logically, this implies that some NHS hospitals have high superbug rates – completely the wrong message to send out! What the public really wants to know is that all hospitals are free from superbugs.

On the other side of the leaflet, the message is “I will choose a hospital with the best quality care”. Again, it implies that some hospitals offer poor quality care, and unfortunately the man saying this appears to have lost his trousers, had his genitals removed and been dressed in high heels. That’s really not the kind of care I’d want.

We hear enough about the NHS’s problems in the media, without their own advertising subconsciously reinforcing them.