We helped to improve personalised care – involving people in discussions and decisions about their care – with a communications strategy to drive uptake of dedicated training courses.
Objective
With new training courses available to meet NHS Long Term Plan commitments around personalised care, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West (BOB) needed support to promote them to healthcare professionals across the region.
What we did
We developed a bespoke communications strategy to drive NHS healthcare professionals to personalised care training, with four phases of discovery, delivery, evaluation and handover.
In the discovery phase, we performed detailed research on the target audiences, the communication channels they use, and the networks that they are part of. Using these insights, we developed the key messages for the campaign.
For delivery, we worked with the Primary Care Careers website (an NHS training hub) to create a webpage for the personalised training courses. We designed a suite of collateral, with a unique visual identity and content tailored to different audiences, to promote them, and these were tested via Primary Care Careers. Our three-phase communications campaign included the launch, follow-up communications based on feedback, and a ‘winter pressures’ blog written by the BOB chief nurse. Part of this phase involved networking and collaboration with the Personalised Care Institute and BOB Integrated Care Systems providers, including in primary, secondary and community care. We also pursued Personalised Care Institute accreditation for the training courses.
A continuous process to review the impact of the campaign was carried out in order to inform our evaluation, including identifying the most effective channels to drive traffic to the courses, and resultant registrations.
A handover phase enabled the BOB Personalised Care training team to take ownership of the communications strategy, activity and collateral to run future campaigns and maintain the newly established, valuable relationships.
Activity
Communications and engagement
Consultancy, strategy and transformation
Conducted the evaluation phase and identified the most effective channels to drive traffic to the courses
Outcome
A minimum of 27,500 healthcare professionals across BOB were reached by the campaign. This led to more than 150 people undertaking the training, ensuring more people are directly involved in decisions and discussions about their care.
This outcome allowed BOB to meet NHS England targets to secure future funding, and BOB was highlighted as a leader in the delivery of personal care training by NHS England.
