by Chris Hopson
COVID-19 has created the biggest challenge the NHS has faced in its 72 year history, from the frontline through to the communications function. Learn how the infrastructure put into place by NHS Providers has enabled it to deliver an authoritative NHS perspective, giving media and the public direct access to a trusted information source.
You’ll learn:
• The importance of ongoing work and investment into the communications infrastructure
• How stakeholder trust can be secured through the delivery of real time data and objective analysis
• Five factors which influence communications excellence and success
Confronting COVID-19 is the biggest challenge the NHS has faced in its 72 year history.
It’s required the service to do some extraordinary things at record pace. Who could possibly have imagined at the beginning of January that, within a few short months, the NHS would have created 33,000 beds to treat coronavirus patients? Discharged thousands of medically fit patients using a new process that was designed in a fortnight? Massively expanded the 111 service to cope with record demand? And accelerated changes we’d all been talking about for ages but found very difficult to deliver – like creating 24/7 mental health A&E services and moving outpatient appointments online?
The scale of the communications challenge has been equally enormous.
Acres of broadcast, print and social media coverage focussed on the NHS with much of it produced by journalists with no expert knowledge of healthcare. A raft of operational communications to keep staff up to speed with a rapidly changing situation. And a very important public facing communications task, ensuring patients knew which services were open, that it was safe to come for treatment if needed, and what was happening to their individual treatment.
NHS Providers, as the voice of trusts, was keen to play its part.
We rapidly recognised that a substantial information gap was opening up between the top level Downing Street press conferences and the often distressing individual pieces of frontline testimony. We thought there was a need for calm and clear explanation of how NHS trusts were seeking to address this unprecedented challenge.
A need for a definitive, authoritative, frontline NHS perspective on the wide range of different issues that hit the news – from testing, ventilators, and PPE to care home discharges, balancing COVID-19 and non-COVID treatment and how trusts were coping with the pandemic. We were, in short, on a mission to explain.
NHS Providers was in a unique position to provide this commentary. We have all 216 trusts and foundation trusts in membership. We have an extremely close connection with our members, including ‘always on’, direct, electronic communications channels with trust CEOs, chairs and communications directors. Our members trust us because we are their membership organisation and they know we will speak truth to power. They are therefore willing share information fully and openly with us, in real time, relying on our judgement on how to best use it.
That enables us to aggregate member intelligence into informed, accurate, national insight with a detailed, up to date understanding of key issues. We can then share and discuss this with national partners such as NHS England and NHS Improvement, building our own understanding of the relevant issue at the same time.
We have also deliberately invested in building outstanding communications, policy and analysis teams and have created a range of national level spokespeople. This meant we were able to process and publicly communicate a significant amount of information at high speed, even though the entire organisation was working from home due to lockdown.
The vast majority of this infrastructure had been built prior to the start of COVID and was the bedrock which allowed us to play the role that we did. In that sense, what we have been able to achieve over the last few months has been the result of years of hard work and investment.
We’ve had a huge amount of positive feedback from our members, parliamentarians, journalists and frontline staff on the role we have played over the last few months. Reflecting on what has gone well, I’d highlight five factors:
Detailed understanding based on real evidence
Our closeness to our members and our trusted relationship with national partners meant that we had a detailed, national level picture of what was going on. We became ‘the place’ to go to if, as a journalist, you wanted a detailed picture of what was happening on the issue of the day. We also had a clear house rule of not going further than what we knew – not commenting on issues where we didn’t have expertise and saying “I don’t know” if asked a question we couldn’t answer.
Objective analysis, telling it as it really is
Journalists told us that they trusted what we said because we gave them objective analysis that was free of the spin that they believed lay behind a lot of what they were being told by Government sources. We made a particular point of acknowledging where there were shortcomings and trying to be accurate about the reasons for them.
Plain and simple language
COVID-19 required all of us making public commentary to become instant experts in a range of different topics, many of them technical and difficult to explain. We put particular emphasis on not just understanding an appropriate level of detail on issues like PPE or testing, but turning our understanding into language that we knew would resonate with journalists and the general public who read them.
Range of formats including full use of new media
We deliberately used a range of different formats to deliver our message, being both proactive and reactive, and it was interesting that each of them played a key role. Our Spotlight briefings sought to bring insight into the key issues.
Our long form Confronting Coronavirus report was the first major, detailed, analysis of how the NHS was responding to the virus. We placed a number of blogs with national newspaper titles and also issued proactive and reactive daily press comments which were used by a range of media outlets. It was particularly gratifying to see our social media activity picked up extensively.
Our long tweet threads rapidly gained a wide and high profile following. And one tweet, highlighting the lack of notice and consultation of a Government announcement on the use of face masks in NHS settings, triggered a major news story by itself as well as 10,000 likes and over 4,000 retweets.
Great team
Underpinning all of this was having a highly motivated, ambitious and professional team who were committed to going the extra mile, not just in terms of putting in the hours, but also working together to combine analysis and policy expertise with communications skill. And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the input and support of our wider team – our members.
One final thought. A lot of communications focus in the NHS goes on external media work. Important though that is, it’s vital to remember that a successful communications team has a variety of tasks to perform – including marketing and internal communications. We’re very proud of the marketing work we have done to support our members and keep them informed – for example creating a very well used web hub of all the key COVID-19 resources members needed in one place.
We’re also equally proud of the work we have done to support our staff and keep them fully informed during a difficult period when they were all working at home.
Chris Hopson joined NHS Providers in September 2012 as chief executive following a career spanning the public, private and voluntary sectors, including senior roles at HM Revenue and Customs, ITV plc and Granada Media. Chris is a graduate of the cross Whitehall, civil service, High Potential Development Scheme, designed to identify and develop the next generation of top civil service leaders, and he holds an MBA from Cranfield Business School.
Twitter: @ChrisCEOHopson