Strategy  /  Branding  /  UX  /  UI  /  Product design  /  Research informed  /  User-centred design  /  Campaign
#PatchTheSlash  2024
A life-saving campaign aiming to empower friends, families, knife carriers and bystanders to help save the lives, and the futures, of those who have been stabbed.
đź“° Â Featured in issue 14 of the Fighting Knife Crime London magazine
"The life-ending choice of carrying a knife is made by a vulnerable heart, so our ideas need to heal the heart and not punish it further."
Bringing the solution directly to the problem, This Poster Saves Lives provides clear and accessible life-saving guides and medical grade resources to treat stab wounds (until paramedics arrive). These innovative posters are placed around the most deprived areas of the country which suffer the most from youth knife crime.
The Issue
By March 2024, there were nearly 4,000 hospital admissions involving a knife and 233 murders, 78 of the victims being under the age of 25.
Previous campaigns that focus on preventing knife carrying, have fallen short in communicating with disadvantaged, fearful and vengeful young people. It is also extremely difficult to alter the long-term causes of knife crime without leaving behind the hopes of victims in the present.
The Aim
Too many young people are dying or are unprepared/ uneducated in treating the stab wounds of their friends and family. By approaching knife crime from the angle of health preservation, #PatchTheSlash aims to save lives and provide a second chance to break the cycle of knife crime to those that have faced death.
Knife-carriers are both the problem and the solution to end death on the streets.
This App Saves Lives provides life-saving first-aid guides and the locations of This Poster Saves Lives. The service includes accessibility features and stores medical information for first responders.
Partnering with fashion and household brands, the campaign instructs how to treat stab wounds in an absence of first-aid resources.
#PatchTheSlash is a catalyst for knife-carriers to reduce knife crime and hope for a second chance at their future. But it's importantly about heartbreak, and if the campaign can save one family's grief it will have succeeded.