In the fall of 2021 Swedish news media reported a maternity care crisis in Region Stockholm. Midwives resigned in protest against deficient working conditions and Region Stockholm appointed a special coordinator to solve the situation. The study aims to examine how Region Stockholm communicatively and strategically addresses problems in maternity care during the so-called maternity care crisis in 2021 and 2022. The questions used to fulfill the purpose of the study are: What events caused the communicative measures? What is the narrative of the communication, and does it differ from medias descriptions of the situation? Which actors are given room to speak and who is attributed responsibility? What rhetorical expressions are used? To answer these questions, previous research and theories regarding crisis communication, crisis rhetoric and message strategies for crisis management are applied. The empirical material consists of eight texts and one video, all produced and published by Region Stockholm on their own website. The nine posts are examined using a qualitative text analysis method. Our results show that mass terminations, deficient working conditions and staff shortage was the most common cause of Region Stockholm’s communicative measures. The narrative of the material was mainly about Region Stockholm presenting measures for the situation within maternity care. However, we could determine a difference between Region Stockholm’s and the media’s descriptions about the situation. The most significant result shows that Region Stockholm does not mention the word crisis in their communication. The result also shows that Region Stockholm is the actor given most room in the communication, where the coordinator is the only person that gets room to express oneself. Logos is the most common rhetorical expression that is invoked by objectively informing about the measures taken and Region Stockholm appeals to ethos by their already existing position in the society and by emphasizing positive aspects of the organization. Finally, we were not able to establish that Region Stockholm attributes crisis responsibility to themselves since they refer to different external factors that can be understood as a cause for the situation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-193758 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Landén, Cornelia, Lyxell, Cornelia |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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