Bizarre Take #14: Can Plant-based Bags Do the Job?

                                            

Onion article : https://www.theonion.com/sustainable-hospital-switches-to-reusable-canvas-blood-1851279339

While looking for satirical pieces to analyze, I came across one of my favorite satire sites, The Onion. This seemingly realistic news outlet portrays current events in a humorous way, looking at them in a critical perspective and oftentimes, exaggerating certain parts of them. The one I looked at in particular was one called, “Sustainable Hospital Switches To Reusable Canvas Blood Bags”. This article went into depth about hospital care and service towards patients. It satirized hospital hygiene and how sanity is usually compromised at the cost of the patient being treated. For example, the author wrote, “replacing them with an alternative that is made from sustainably sourced, locally foraged plant fibers and can be used again and again”. This shows how hospitals are more fixated on reducing the impact of their supplies by trying to reuse them than actually caring for their patients and looking to make sure their hygiene is up to standard. They often end up compromising patient sanity because of this.

This article employs many instances of irony to show how hospitals have changed in recent times, and are lacking in terms of patient care and service. The author writes, “This is part of a broader initiative in which we hope to eliminate all single-use supplies, including bandages, hypodermic needles, and urinary catheters”. A hospital's main purpose is to provide their patients with high-quality supplies to help with pain relief, such as bandages and such. However, this article shows irony by saying how their aim nowadays is to completely eliminate the use of it. This displays a mocking tone, showing how hospitals care more about the resources they use than actually paying more care to patient safety and hygiene, oftentimes, compromising it. The author also utilizes exaggeration in order to further her point and show a change in hospital care. She writes, “In addition, we’ll be making an effort to conserve energy by shutting off all the medical equipment at night.”. This adds sort of a dramatic perspective, and slightly exaggerates how hospitals are slowly showing less care to their patients, such as shutting down the equipment. All these elements are executed pretty well by the Onion, and show how hospitals are losing sight of their service towards patients, and should place more emphasis on patient safety than resource utilization :))