To boldly go? Place, metaphor, and the marketing of Auckland's Starship Hospital

In this paper, we place the naming of the Starship Children's Hospital in A uckland, New Zealand, within the context of increasingly consumer-oriented health care provision. This use of metaphor alludes to the hospital's disti nctive design features and represents an attempt to de-emphasise connotatio ns associated with institutionalised medicine, thus normalising the place f or children. However, those naming the hospital had more than children in m ind. Rather, there was a dual intent: to market the hospital as a distincti ve place for monetary donors, as well as promoting a more therapeutic envir onment for youthful users. Through the vehicle of our case study, we raise questions concerning the competition by health care services for public and private funds. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond viewing hos pitals as service entities and equating health care consumption with utilis ation behaviour. Rather, a merging of insights from the political economy o f health care and new cultural geography literatures can aid the developmen t of more finely textured understandings of the meaning of contemporary hea lth care, and the role of metaphor and marketing in selling places of healt h care consumption.