Failing livers, anticipated futures and un/desired transplants.

This article looks at liver transplants as life-prolonging treatment for chronic liver failure and examines the role anticipation plays in the context of chronic liver conditions. Based on anthropological fieldwork in Germany, this article draws on three exemplary patient accounts to show how the anticipatory experience of waiting for a liver transplant serves as an important period in transplant trajectories, and how the lack of a wait may have long-term consequences for patients' wellbeing. A focus on waiting and anticipation in the context of chronic livers enables new understandings of the complex temporal qualities that living with chronic conditions entails. As the sole long-term treatment available for failing livers, the possibilities of transplant medicine shape patients' anticipation of their future. Conversely, the particular futures that patients anticipate mould how they make sense of their transplant and their chronic pre- and post-transplant lives. This article shows that rather than offering a unilinear treatment with a clear-cut end, liver transplants, as treatment for a wide range of chronic conditions, reproduce chronic lives.

Public health communication: Attitudes, experiences, and lessons learned from users of a COVID-19 digital triage tool for children.

Background: The pandemic has made public health communication even more daunting because acceptance and implementation of official guidelines and recommendations hinge on this. The situation becomes even more precarious when children are involved. Our child-specific COVID-19 online forward triage tool (OFTT) revealed some of the public health communication challenges. We aimed to explore attitudes, experiences, and challenges faced by OFTT users and their families, in regard to public health recommendations. Methods: We selected key informants (n = 20) from a population of parents, teachers, guardians, as well as doctors who had used the child-specific COVID-19 OFTT and had consented to a further study. Videos rather than face-face interviews were held. Convenience and quota sampling were performed to include a variety of key informants. Interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed for themes. Results: Several themes emerged, namely; (1) definition and expectations of high-risk persons, (2) quarantine instructions and challenges, (3) blurred division of responsibility between authorities and parents, (4) a novel condition and the evolution of knowledge, (5) definition and implications of socioeconomic status, (6) new normal and societal divisions, and (7) the interconnectedness of these factors-systems thinking. Conclusion: As the virus is evolving and circumstances are changing rapidly, the communication of public health to the different interest groups becomes, both an art and science, even more so when using a new technological communication channel: an OFTT. A myriad of interconnected factors seems to influence attitudes toward public health recommendations, which calls for systems thinking in public health communication.