The archive · PR & Stunts · Marketing decision · 2023–2024
NHS places 233 handcrafted dolls in UK waiting rooms, one per child awaiting an organ
With 233 children on the UK transplant list, NHS Blood and Transplant sat one handcrafted doll per child in hospital and GP waiting rooms.
NHS Blood and Transplant
What it had to solve
NHS Blood and Transplant had an urgent shortage of paediatric organ donors, with 233 children in the UK on the waiting list for a transplant — a wait that was real to clinicians but invisible to the public.
How it works
NHS Blood and Transplant had an urgent shortage of paediatric organ donors, and 233 children in the UK were on the waiting list for a transplant. The problem was almost invisible: a register of names that no one outside the transplant system ever saw.
The Waiting to Live campaign made that wait public. Around its November 2023 launch, 233 bespoke dolls — each handcrafted to represent an individual child and to tell their real-life story — appeared in hospitals and GP surgeries across the country.
The dolls turned a number into a roomful of presences in the most emotionally loaded setting there is: the waiting rooms where families sit hoping. OOH, TV, press and influencer work carried the same stories further.
Earned media alone generated over 1.5 billion impressions, and the work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- Waiting is invisible by nature; giving each of the 233 children a physical stand-in made the list something people could see and count.
- Hospital and GP waiting rooms put the message in front of the audience most likely to act — families who could register as donors — at the moment they were waiting.
- Bespoke dolls tied to real children's stories made the issue specific and human instead of a statistic.
- The 1.5 billion earned impressions show the stunt itself carried the message without paid amplification.
What it did
Earned media alone generated over 1.5 billion impressions; an invisible register of 233 children became a physical presence in waiting rooms across the UK, and the work is held in the D&AD awards archive.
What you can take
A statistic hides scale; presence reveals it. Putting one physical stand-in per person in the most emotionally charged room turns an abstract list into something people walk past and act on.
Since then
Waiting to Live made a long-standing shortage tangible: 233 children waiting, each now represented by a doll in a waiting room where families sit. The campaign generated more than 1.5 billion impressions through earned media alone, and the work is held in the D&AD awards archive. For clinicians and families, the public conversation had shifted from an abstract register to the stories of the children whose lives depended on a donor.
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