At a time when media attention is focused on the blockbuster seasonal ad campaigns a new promotional film called ‘The Wait’ for NHS Blood & Transplant has been released. To mark the launch a free public screening was hosted at Vue Cinema on Regent Street with an added twist: it didn’t matter what time in the day you turn up because the film is 14 hours long.
The Wait is longer than any promotional film ever screened (the previous being a 13 hour ad for an American restaurant chain) but is not an advertisement. It’s an ambitious PR response to an unseen problem: the true scale of the donor organ shortage in the UK.
Almost 49,000 people in the UK have endured the wait for an organ transplant in the last 10 years and over 6,000, including 270 children, have died before receiving the transplant they desperately needed, new statistics from NHS Blood & Transplant reveal.
For the first time people can experience a typical day and the mundane reality of someone on the organ list waiting to know if they will live and die. A story that can’t told in a 30 second clip or soundbite, the film gives a voice to a family to talk candidly about how it feels to be on borrowed time.
The film was shot continually in one November day in the home of the Howell family. Simon Howell, 41, has been waiting for a new kidney for almost six years and was formerly a doctor until his illness made him practically housebound. Yet despite this, family life continues to function as normal in many ways in a daily routine not short of love, hope and humour.
The full length version will be able to viewing full on the www.organdonation.nhs.uk/timetosign from today until January 2016. It is hoped that if not already on the register viewers will be moved enough to sign and help to potentially save the lives of up to nine other people by becoming an organ donor.
At launch ITN featured The Wait cinema launch, an interview with Simon and the new NHSBT statistics as the third item on the national lunchtime and evening news. The story was covered by almost every national news source including features in the Daily Mirror, Metro and a lengthy interview with Simon on Radio 4’s You and Yours.
The Wait film is part of a wider winter campaign created by the NHS Blood & Transplant team at ENGINE as collaboration between MHP and sister agency WCRS.