Lectoraat Zorg rond het Levenseinde

‘How can we influence the public image of palliative care?’

During this project, I worked together with a team (Romy Winters, Mare Creemers & Jerry-Lee Bosman) to find a way in which we could influence the public image of palliative care into something less tragic and saddening.

The start

For this project, we got assigned to a company with a design question. Our company, Lectoraat Zorg rond het Levenseinde by Avans Hogeschool, gave us the question: ‘How can we influence the public image of palliative care?’.

Our first step was to make a wall filled with assumptions and prejudices. In this way, we could get a taste of what the public image is to begin with. We found that in general, it’s a pretty depressing, fearful and saddening view.

Our history

Our job was to change the public image of palliative care from something seen as saddening and fearful to something that is actually quite positive. Most of the time it is actually about giving people a worthy, comfortable and pain-free ending. In a way, it is beautiful.

Our target audience was people who are studying care in general. We needed to find a way in which we could motivate the students to consider working in the palliative care and show them that it’s actually a very beautiful job.

On the picture, you see the first ideas that came to mind. You can mainly see happy colours, positive words and even a party garland. This party garland is what we based our final product on.

The creating

Below, you’ll first find 10 pictures of materials we brought to the workshop. We wanted to make risoprints that were a combination of all four of us, so everybody had to bring a couple of items to combine during the printing process. The only rule was that it had to symbolise a party, or happiness in some way.

Below that, you’ll find all of the risoprints we made. We combined all of our brought along products and used bright and funky colours.

The final product

Finally, this is what we came up with. If you look closer you can see we made a garland that says: ‘palliatieve zorg (which means palliative care)’. We also made flyers to hand out and some posters.

Sadly, this is the point where COVID-19 hit our country so we weren’t able to actually present it at the local care school. However, this would’ve been hung up at that school to promote palliative care amongst students.

The feedback

Sadly, because of COVID-19, we weren’t actually able to do our presentation as shown on the left here.

However, we did do a presentation online and we got great feedback, like: ‘we were super divided amongst all members of het Lectoraat about whether we felt this hit the right string or not. You may feel like that is a bad thing, however it is not. We have been working together for so many years that we almost never disagree on a subject, so you’ve really given us something to think about.’