NHS communication comes of age
In the week the NHS celebrates its 70th anniversary with its #NHS70 campaign, Angharad Neagle, group managing director of Freshwater UK, explores how communicators are involving patients and communities to shape an NHS that is truly for the people, by the people.
This Thursday (5 July 2018) marks 70 years since the then-Minister for Health Aneurin Bevan, founded one of our most treasured institutions, the National Health Service (NHS). Underpinned then, as now, by the principle that healthcare should be accessible to all, free at the point of need and funded by taxation, the NHS at 70 is in many other ways unrecognisable to the service established by Tredegar-born Bevan in 1948.
While it still maintains an enviable global reputation for quality and safety, as you might expect from an organisation with several decades under its belt, the NHS has faced challenges and change along the way. From the good – such as major breakthroughs in DNA structure, cancer treatment and the use of robotic tools during surgery, to the bad – think cyber-attacks, tackling obesity and growing levels of substance abuse, the NHS has not been allowed to stand still. And of course, neither has its communications.
As an agency that has worked with NHS organisations across the UK for more than 20 years, Freshwater has seen first-hand, and played a part in, the subtle but significant shift in focus from ‘communicating at patients’, to truly engaging with, and listening to, people.
Examine healthcare communications over the last 70 years – or even in just the past decade or two – and you’ll see a definite change from a well-meaning but ultimately paternalistic ‘doctor knows best’ narrative that placed patients firmly in a passive position, towards one focused on services being shaped jointly by clinicians, carers and patients.
While the NHS doesn’t always get it right, as businesses, we can still learn a lot from the way the NHS has evolved its communications. We all know that listening to our customers – no matter what field or sector we operate in – is essential if we want to be successful. However, in recognising that people’s health and care needs are changing as they live longer, the NHS has made huge efforts to take this a step further and go beyond just listening to its stakeholders, by involving them in designing the way services are run.
We may think we know what our customers want, but we must accept that their needs will always change and, unless we engage them in conversations about our products and services, we’re likely to be missing out on valuable information.
It’s not just the NHS’ philosophy of involving local service users that provides a stellar blueprint for businesses; we can also learn a thing or two from the way it goes about capturing their views. Gone are the days of solely relying on posters and village hall meetings. NHS organisations are now reaching out to people and motivating them to get involved in conversations, in far more innovative and engaging ways.
Today’s NHS engagement takes the form of bespoke events that make sure that seldom heard groups are offered a platform and a voice to help shape their services. Engagement roadshows, such as the ‘Chatty Van’ Freshwater used to support an NHS consultation in the north east, take important health messages out into the heart of the community, meeting people on their doorsteps, at schools and outside local amenities. Public hearings known as ‘citizen juries’ see the public listen to clinical evidence before acting as jurors to make decisions; putting local people at the centre of debates about health challenges and, crucially, potential solutions. The use of apps and interactive feedback tools is allowing the NHS to effectively gather views from people at events in real-time, and help make it as easy for people to participate in conversations as possible. By adopting innovative measures, the NHS is able to ensure decisions about how it shapes and delivers its services are now being shared between the people who provide the service, and the people who use it.
While the NHS’ fundamental principles have happily remained the same, how it uses communication to achieve its goals has truly come of age – constantly evolving, and often innovating, so that the NHS remains a service for the people, but is now shaped by the people too.
To any organisation that thinks it’s too big, too busy or too ‘expert’ to listen to input from others, we only need to look at what NHS communicators have achieved in recent years to see what the benefits can be. After all, if at 70 the NHS can learn a new trick or two, then surely we can too?
This article originally appeared in the Western Mail newspaper on Monday 2nd July 2018.