Trust
the Healer.Barosakare — Pakistan’s National Campaign to End Violence Against Healthcare Workers
When a patient’s attendant strikes a doctor, it is rarely a simple act of cruelty. It is the end of a long chain of frustration, confusion, fear, and unmet need. ICRC Pakistan commissioned White Rice to find that chain — and break it — through embedded research, experience design, and a national behaviour change campaign that reached over 4 million people.
From Embedded Research
to a National Movement
ICRC engaged White Rice for one of the most demanding briefs we have received — not a brief to make a campaign, but a brief to understand a crisis first, and then design the response. Our role spanned the complete arc: embedded HCD field research across two major hospitals, journey mapping and experience design recommendations for the healthcare system, training strategy for healthcare staff, and the full design and execution of Barosakare — a national multi-channel behaviour change campaign that changed the public conversation around healthcare violence in Pakistan.
Key Outcomes
A family in fear.
A system that doesn’t explain itself.
A patient is critical. The attendant has been waiting for hours, has received no information, cannot find the right person to ask, and does not understand what is happening. Fear becomes frustration. Frustration becomes confrontation. The healthcare worker at the desk — often junior, often undertrained for conflict — becomes the target of a rage that belongs to the system, not to them.
A professional under impossible pressure.
Understaffed, overstretched, managing dozens of patients and their families with minimal support systems. When violence strikes — and in Pakistan’s major public hospitals, it strikes regularly — the consequences ripple outward immediately. Doctors abandon their work. Other patients are neglected. The entire ward suffers because one person’s frustration was never addressed earlier in the chain.
To design the solution,
we had to become part of the problem.
The decision to have a White Rice researcher become a patient was not part of the original brief. It emerged from the field — from the recognition that no amount of observation could substitute for the experience of waiting three hours without information, being turned away from a desk, not knowing if your family member was alive or dying, and having no one in the building whose job it was to help you understand. The TV ad’s emotional power traces directly to that day.
Fix the system. Change the culture.
Both. At the same time.
The ad that made
Pakistan see both sides.
The Barosakare TV ad became the most visible and widely discussed element of the campaign. Its power came from a structural decision that was itself a product of the HCD research: instead of condemning violence, it showed the consequence chain. Not the act — the aftermath. Not the attacker — the patient who suffers next.
The ad ran on two tracks simultaneously: the escalating consequences of violence for the hospital and the patients who depend on it, and an empathetic portrait of what the patient’s attendant was experiencing that led to that moment. Both sides. At the same time. Neither villainised.
One message.
Every medium Pakistan pays attention to.
The Impact
Barosakare demonstrated that healthcare violence in Pakistan is not an intractable cultural problem — it is a design and communication problem. When people understand the consequences of their actions, when they feel seen on both sides of the encounter, and when the healthcare system removes the friction points that trigger frustration, the behaviour changes. The campaign’s reach proved the demand for this conversation existed and was waiting for a voice.
The campaign’s TV ad remains the most resonant piece of health communication on this issue ever produced in Pakistan — because it trusted the audience enough to show them both sides of the story, without deciding for them which side was right.
The healer cannot heal
if they are afraid
to show up.
Barosakare began with a team member becoming a patient in one of Pakistan’s most overwhelmed hospitals — and it ended with four million people reconsidering what happens when fear becomes violence in a place that is supposed to save lives. That journey, from embedded research to national movement, is what White Rice was built to make.
