Each year, hospice services throughout the country provide palliative and holistic wrap around care to over 10,000 people who die, as well as another 9,000 living with terminal illness, and their whānau. Everything provided through hospices around the country is free of charge.
Hospice New Zealand (NZ) is the national organisation that represents these hospice services in New Zealand. They work in partnership with the 32 member hospices across Aotearoa to ensure people needing end of life hospice care are well supported. Hospice NZ also leads and supports the hospice movement, working to provide equity of access and consistent delivery of palliative and end of life care for New Zealanders, and give voice to their interests, views and concerns.
For people to be able to use hospice services, they need to be aware of and have accurate perceptions about the types of services that are offered. Therefore, Hospice NZ wanted to understand the current public awareness and perceptions of hospice and palliative care, and public attitudes towards death and dying. These insights would then improve the targeting of their media, marketing, and PR activities, and to support their government advocacy work.
“A big part of what Hospice NZ does is advocacy work and awareness raising,” says Wayne Naylor, Chief Executive, Te Kahu Pairuri o Aotearoa – Hospice New Zealand. “So, we need to know what the population thinks and what their attitudes towards death and dying are so our awareness raising is targeted to the right people, with the right messages, and is addressing any misperceptions. For advocacy work, it’s really useful to be able to go to the government with actual data that shows 1 in 5 New Zealanders have cared for someone who is dying, making it an important topic for the public to know about.”
It’s no secret that people get anxious when talking about death and dying. As a result it can be difficult to get people to respond to surveys. The nature of the research meant that both Perceptive and Hospice NZ needed to approach the research with respect and consideration for the subject matter and take into consideration sampling.
“It is a challenging area to talk to people about, which is exactly why we’re doing it, because being prepared for your own death or for someone’s close to you is really important,” says Wayne from Hospice NZ.
A key focus for Hospice NZ was making sure they had a good response rate across age groups, ethnicity and geographic location to make the results applicable to as many New Zealanders as possible. In particular, they wanted to ensure good coverage from Māori and people living in rural areas, which are typically underrepresented in surveys.
We talked to the Perceptive team about this and we modified the recruitment process to ensure we had enough respondents and oversampled from these groups to make sure they were covered.
—Wayne Naylor, Chief Executive, Te Kahu Pairuri o Aotearoa - Hospice New Zealand
With the challenge clear, Perceptive set up and ran an online 10-minute Public Attitudes Survey open to New Zealand residents 18 years or older. Special care was taken to ensure strong representation of Māori and rural residents.
A total of n=1,318 responses were collected and weighted by age, gender and region to represent the New Zealand population.
Following the survey fieldwork and analysis, Perceptive provided Hospice NZ with a 60-page report of the findings. These findings were presented to Hospice NZ’s CEO and Board and hospice network groups, before the whole report then being disseminated to the member hospices.
“Hospice CEs really appreciated the research when it was presented to them. They’re using it as a live document, which is a testament to its insights. It’s not been put in a drawer; it’s being used every day,” says Gretchen Leuthart, Communications Manager, Te Kahu Pairuri o Aotearoa – Hospice New Zealand.
The insights from the Public Attitudes Survey have not only helped Hospice NZ tailor and target its messaging, pivot their marketing, fuel awareness of their services, and empower their advocacy work, but has led to a world-first campaign to raise awareness of how the dying are treated in our communities.
The Public Attitudes Survey found that over two-thirds of New Zealanders agreed that they feel anxious and uncomfortable when thinking about a loved one dying (69%). A similar number know that they can make a positive difference to the experience of someone they care about who is dying (66%).
This research finding kickstarted a conversation with the Clemenger BBDO team about a new awareness campaign for Hospice NZ.
"As part of our awareness raising, we wanted people to know more about Hospice. So, we started having conversations with BBDO about it and the survey’s feedback, and how we could get people to be more open to hospice,” says Wayne from Hospice NZ. “We realised it came down to being more open to talking about death and dying and bringing that conversation into the public space."
Working with Hospice NZ, a creative team came together to produce a new and world-first campaign: Dying Reviews.
The aim of the campaign is to shine a light on what it’s like to interact with society when you’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
In addition to encouraging conversations about death and dying, Hospice NZ hopes for Dying Reviews to be a national check on how New Zealand treats people who are dying, so society and businesses can continually find ways to improve.
Launched in May 2024, Dying Reviews is a collaborative effort between Hospice NZ, Clemenger BBDO (creative), Levo NZ (website build), GRC + Porter Novelli (PR) and Perceptive (review collection, collation and analysis), with all agency work done as pro bono.
"There’s a direct link with what we found in our public perception research and why we’re doing the Dying Reviews campaign," says Wayne.
Hospice’s challenge was immediately apparent to us – to rebrand dying from something that happens in a distant room, to other people, to something that is constantly happening all around us, and will happen to all of us. It is an integral part of our human journey that deserves investment, empathy and attention, and yes, money.
—Brigid Alkema, Chief Creative Officer, Clemenger BBDO
Once over 600 responses are collected through the Dying Reviews portal, the results will be analysed and a report released publicly, with organisations who have scored well being heroed for their approach and processes.
For organisations that are performing poorly, Hospice NZ intends to work constructively with them to offer solutions, like developing compassionate policies and training for their staff.
"We hope the findings will encourage a national conversation on how we can all be more compassionate and not afraid to talk about dying when we encounter people at this stage of their life," says Wayne.
Hospice NZ plans to run the campaign year-on-year to not only continue the conversation about dying well but also gain valuable, ongoing insights into how New Zealand organisations treat terminally ill New Zealanders and their whānau.
Death and dying is often a taboo subject in New Zealand, yet Perceptive and Hospice NZ have tackled this sensitive topic with care and diligence to deliver outstanding awareness, advocacy and social impact.
This study has gone above and beyond its original scope, from helping Hospice NZ tailor and target its messaging, pivot their marketing, fuel awareness of their services, and empower their advocacy work, to sowing the seed for developing a world-first campaign to raise awareness of how the dying are treated in our communities. The Hospice NZ and Perceptive Public Attitudes Survey is a powerful example how insights can become a tipping point for social change.
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