To Boldly Go? Place, Metaphor, and the Marketing of Auckland's Starship Hospital

Abstract

In this paper, we place the naming of the Starship Children's Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, within the context of increasingly consumer-oriented health care provision. This use of metaphor alludes to the hospital's distinctive design features and represents an attempt to de-emphasise connotations associated with institutionalised medicine, thus normalising the place for children. However, those naming the hospital had more than children in mind. Rather, there was a dual intent: to market the hospital as a distinctive place for monetary donors, as well as promoting a more therapeutic environment for youthful users. Through the vehicle of our case study, we raise questions concerning the competition by health care services for public and private funds. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond viewing hospitals as service entities and equating health care consumption with utilisation behaviour. Rather, a merging of insights from the political economy of health care and new cultural geography literatures can aid the development of more finely textured understandings of the meaning of contemporary health care, and the role of metaphor and marketing in selling places of health care consumption.