Living life: mottos and logos on renal transplantation designed by high school students.

The discrepancy between the supply of organs for transplantation and the clinical demand for them is a crucial issue in nephrology. To overcome this gap, several policies have been implemented to increase the general public’s knowledge and awareness of the problem; accordingly, Italian law requires that transplantation medicine and end of life issues be discussed in high school [1,2]. In publicity or educational campaigns, the use of images to communicate core concepts is crucial to the success of any such initiative [3,4]. Furthermore, a commercial advertising campaign is usually preceded by a detailed market analysis and a study of the best way to present the product [5]. This approach is commonly employed by medical suppliers, and great attention (possibly too great) is paid to carefully advertising new drugs and products—with the extensive use of gadgets, gimmicks and colourful brochures in the process. In contrast, educational campaigns on crucial social issues, such as renal transplantation or organ donation, often are planned without help from experts working directly in the relevant professional fields and without analysing the opinions of the target population or ‘consumers’ (in this case, the patients and donors), often also without substantial help from public relation experts. Few of us nephrologists have the opportunity to learn and discuss how our work is ‘viewed’ by persons not affected by renal disease or by those linked to us only socially (i.e. friends or non-professional relationships). With the preceding as background, the present experiment was conducted in an artistic high school in conjunction with its participation in a city-wide educational programme for high school students that was run by the Section of Nephrology of the University of Turin. This was an appropriate occasion to evaluate the way young people conceptualize the ‘idea’ of renal transplantation and how they would choose to communicate the ‘life and death’ concepts of renal replacement therapy, a crucial point in educational campaigns [6]. For this purpose, we organized a competition that was included in that school’s programme. Here we report on the results of the competition.