Abstract
COVID-19 has posed unprecedented challenges to health systems around the world, including blood collection agencies (BCAs). Many countries, such as Canada and Australia, that rely on non-remunerated voluntary donors saw an initial drop in donors in the early days of the pandemic followed by a return to sufficient levels of the blood supply. BCA messaging plays a key role in communicating the needs of the blood operator, promoting and encouraging donation, educating, and connecting with the public and donors. This paper is an interpretive discourse analysis of BCA messaging in Canada and Australia from March 1-July 31, 2020 to understand how BCAs constructed donation to encourage donation during this period and what this can tell us about public trust and blood operators. Drawing on multiple sources of online content and print media, our analysis identified four dominant messages during the study period: 1) blood donation is safe; 2) blood donation is designated an essential activity; 3) blood is needed; and 4) blood donation is a response to the pandemic. In Canada and Australia, our analysis suggests that: 1) in a time of uncertainty, donors and some publics trusted the BCA to be an organization with expertise to ensure that donation is safe, essential, and able to meet patient needs; and 2) BCAs demonstrated their trustworthiness by aligning their messaging with public health and scientific experts. For BCAs, our analysis supports donor communications that are transparent and responsive to public concerns and the local context to support public trust. Beyond BCAs, health organizations and leaders cannot underestimate the importance of building and maintaining public trust as countries continue to struggle with containment of the virus and encourage vaccine uptake.
Highlights
On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic posing unprecedented challenges to health, social, and economic systems around the world
Consistency of public health messaging during COVID-19 has been a challenge in many jurisdictions, which is concerning given the importance of public trust in encouraging behavioural compliance (Cairns et al, 2013)
For both Canadian Blood Services’ (CBS) and Lifeblood, a dominant theme in their messaging throughout the period of analysis is that blood donation is safe both in terms of: 1) the safety of the blood supply, and 2) the safety of donors and staff in donor centres
Summary
On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic posing unprecedented challenges to health, social, and economic systems around the world. In the early days of the pandemic, many BCAs started collecting convalescent plasma and faced challenges encouraging donors to come forward for this purpose (Gehrie et al, 2020) Despite these challenges, in Australia and Canada, following initial increases in donor cancellations, blood supply has maintained sufficient levels suggesting strong public and donor response (Dawkins, 2020; Tomazin, 2020). BCAs are embedded within health, regulatory, and administrative structures that shape blood collection systems, including who and how they recruit and how blood is collected They operate within specific historical, political, and sociocultural contexts which influence their messaging and rhetorical strategies and the sociocultural scripts that underlie these messages (Charbonneau and Smith, 2015). The guiding questions in our analysis were: How do CBS and Lifeblood construct blood donation in their messaging to the public and donors? What can the messaging tell us about the trust between BCAs and donors in the context of a pandemic?
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