Changing the image of a hospital is easy. Changing the image of an institution is not.

Especially when that institution has spent decades building public recognition around something as serious and emotionally loaded as cancer.

Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) is one of those institutions. For years, the public relationship with UCI has been shaped largely by necessity. You go there because someone has cancer. The association is therefore powerful: Cancer = UCI. But it can also be limiting because UCI’s ambitions have grown considerably.

Its own materials now describe an institution involved in research, training, consultation, clinical care, molecular imaging, advanced cancer treatment and regional capacity-building.

It is also developing advanced diagnostic and therapeutic services through its Molecular Imaging and Therapy Division. Its radiation oncology training programme explicitly aims to develop UCI into an East African regional training centre of excellence.

That is a very different institutional proposition from simply being “the cancer hospital in Kampala.” So what happens when an institution’s capabilities and ambitions begin moving faster than its public image?

Eventually, the image has to catch up. That may explain the strange photographs currently circulating online. UCI’s people suddenly look different.

More confident. More contemporary. More human. It is tempting to call this a rebrand.

But perhaps that undersells it. A rebrand changes how an institution looks. A genuine transformation changes how people understand it, and if the messages coming from UCI are anything to go by, something bigger than a new logo may be on the way.