Health communication in a Dutch hospital serial

One way for health communication professionals to reach a large audience with their health message is the Entertainment-Education (E-E) strategy, which means that their message is incorporated in an entertainment program. The most recent E-E production in the Netherlands is the hospital drama serial Centraal Medisch Centrum, which was broadcasted in the last months of 2016 on the commercial channel RTL4. The aim of this thesis is to shed light on how the different involved professionals collaborated in the designing, production and implementation of CMC and it examines how the health messages in the serial are appreciated by the professionals and by viewers. Furthermore, a narrative analysis of three storylines explores how the health issues are incorporated in the serial. Results of six in-depth interviews with respondents from different health organizations, the Friends Lottery and RTL, suggest that the health organizations played the smallest role during the collaboration process. Their role was mainly to provide facts and information, whereas the production company Talpa had the biggest influence on the scripts. The health organizations were not involved in the decision-making process, rather they were dependent on the choices of the Friends Lottery, RTL and Talpa. Therefore, this collaboration process bears most resemblance to an E-E service partnership arrangement. The results also suggest that the interviewed stakeholders are content with both the process and the results. By conducting three focus groups with members of the audience, this thesis shows that even though it is argued that the serial is not very sensational and the health messages are not very strong, the viewers are still able to reproduce health information from the episodes. Therefore, this thesis shows that this particular type of E-E collaboration can lead to increased awareness and knowledge among viewers about health issues. As such, it hopes to provide useful information for professionals who want to produce a similar E-E hospital serial in the future. Further research is suggested to explore the long-term effects of this E-E production and to keep improving this type E-E collaboration.