by Amanda Nash
The NHS is one of the most recognisable brands in the world. Already highly regarded and trusted across the UK, public confidence has only increased in the NHS since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The big question is how can the NHS now build on renewed interest in its careers and expand and develop its workforce?
You’ll learn:
• About Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives as one of the most successful public health campaigns ever
• How COVID-19 has increased trust in our healthcare professionals but workforce is the biggest challenge facing the NHS
• That appreciation and feeling valued helps to build staff engagement and loyalty
Think NHS. What does it mean to you?
If you or a loved one is a patient your recent experience, your hopes and fears, will be all too present. If you work for the NHS, your daily work, shifts and colleagues will likely spring to mind. If you’re both, you’ll have a range of experiences and interactions to draw on.
Whatever your personal experience, there is now something else at play in our national psyche – the role of the NHS as a National Heroes Service, in responding to COVID-19.
This isn’t new. Danny Boyle gave the NHS a starring role in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony [1]. This showed the health service as an institution sacred to many, one which in times of VUCA [2] offers a safe and trusted promise of guaranteed help.
And since the pandemic, if you consider the way the NHS has stepped up, donning PPE to care for patients with and without the virus, it’s likely that when you think about the NHS, images of staff holding ‘Stay Home’ signs, pictures of rainbows and communities clapping in the streets also come to mind.
Gut feeling
A brand, as Neumeier defines it [3], is nothing less than “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”
How do you feel about the NHS? Those three letters - which were brilliantly inverted to stand for Stay Home Now during the first phase of COVID - have a strong emotional trigger too.
The NHS lozenge, one of the most recognised brand identities in the world [4], prompts a range of feelings with trust, high regard and confidence popular amongst them.
Top for trust
If satisfaction levels can be used as a proxy for that ‘gut feeling’, then the nation has a good feeling towards the NHS. And it’s a feeling that was getting stronger even before the pandemic hit.
Public satisfaction with the NHS had jumped to 60% in 2019, a 7% point increase from the previous year. This rating, reported in the 2019 British Social Attitudes survey [5] was taken between July-October 2019, before daily images of a virus affecting people in China came anywhere near our screens.
It is unsurprising nurses top the 2020 IPSOS Mori Veracity Index [6] for those we trust the most, believed in by 97% of those polled, with a 2% increase since 2018. They are followed by local pharmacists (a new addition) and doctors, who at 95% have also increased their ratings by 3% in recent years. This polling was undertaken in May 2020, when COVID-19 had a tight grip on a nation in lockdown and the NHS was at the centre of the response.
If satisfaction and trust is high, the public is also confident in the NHS to deliver, relying on it to be there for them in the midst of a global pandemic. At the end of April 2020, 82% of those asked were confident the NHS would cope with the pandemic [7]. The proportion of people who were ‘very confident’ doubled in just over a month.
Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives
Pre-and-during COVID-19 data shows the NHS is trusted and revered. So when it is threatened, the country rallies, eager to protect the NHS. It is, after all, our last bastion of hope in a health crisis.
While some have taken issue with elements of the Government’s messaging during the pandemic, the Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives campaign [8] was a stroke of genius. It was one of the most successful public health campaigns in recent history, in terms of its ability to impact our behaviour. It gave a clear call to action and a why – protecting our most-cherished institution, the heroes staffing it and preserving it for ourselves, should we need it.
The nation listened, acted and did indeed stay home [9]. The campaign was so effective, subsequent easing of lockdown was more difficult.
The Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives slogan may, in time, turn out to be as memorable a mantra in our history books as Lord Kitchener’s WWI Your Country Needs You.
Why does this matter?
With satisfaction, trust and confidence all high and rising, the reputation of the NHS is at a strong point. There are many reasons why the strength of the NHS brand matters. Not least is attracting, retaining and motivating a skilled workforce. It’s often argued workforce is the biggest challenge facing the NHS. As the world has seen, you can build hospitals quickly; the far harder task is staffing them with trained and qualified practitioners.
The NHS went into COVID-19 with more than 100,000 vacancies [10] – 1 in every 12 posts in hospital and community services.
For roles like porters and entry-level healthcare assistants, there is competition from the retail world to attract staff. Even amongst professionals who have invested in a career in healthcare, loyalty to the NHS cannot be taken for granted: a 2018 YouGov survey found that 1 in 5 young doctors plan on switching to the private sector [11] at some point in the future.
Building loyalty
In our trust, Organisational Development and Communications have jointly run a programme called Emerging Stronger. Colleagues have been asked to reflect on what they want to learn from the pandemic period and take forward, what needs to stop and what needs to change. One of the things staff told us they liked about communication during this time was the clear and common sense of purpose. It was unifying in the threat of a common enemy: COVID-19.
This rallying purpose was not limited to our organisation. The NHS urged former staff to come out of retirement and return to the service via ‘Return to Practice’ to help respond to the pandemic. The Nuffield Trust [12] reported: “By mid-April, nearly 11,000 former and overseas nurses and midwives had joined the emergency staff register and twice the number of students had extended clinical placements.” People, past and future, wanted to help.
If, as D’Aprix [13] says, internal communications is about creating and sharing meaning, then the pandemic has amplified the rich sense of purpose already there: the NHS exists to care for people in their time of need. At heart, its purpose is the most highly skilled delivery of kindness.
During the first acute months of COVID-19 that kindness and selflessness was centre-stage. It was lauded and applauded. It made working for the NHS feel an even more worthwhile role and staff demonstrated this by using ‘Proud to work for the NHS’ in their social media profile pics and bios.
Appreciation and feeling valued [14] at different levels help build staff engagement and loyalty. Loyalty matters because, put simply, it allows the NHS to recruit and retain people to safely staff services.
In our own organisation, in spring 2020, 1,800 of our 8,663 staff responded to a PULSE survey: 79% of those said they would recommend our trust as a place to work – our highest ever rating.
The challenge now, as the NHS People Plan [15] published this summer recognises, is:
Growing for the future particularly the need to build on renewed interest in NHS careers, to expand and develop our workforce, as well as taking steps to retain colleagues for longer.
One of our challenges as NHS Communicators is to help sustain that feeling of appreciation and value, as well as the focus on the wellbeing and support of our staff, as we move forward.
Sources
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01b7461
[2] https://hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you
[3] https://www.emotivebrand.com/defining-brand/
[4] https://www.england.nhs.uk/nhsidentity/#:~:text=The%2520NHS%2520Identity%2520is%2520one,levels%2520of%2520trust%2520and%2520reassurance.
[5] https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/public-satisfaction-with-the-nhs-rose-sharply-in-2019
[6] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2020-06/veracity_index_2020.pdf
[7] https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/spike-britons-thinking-government-acted-too-late-address-coronavirus-confidence-nhs-continues-grow
[8] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/01/story-behind-stay-home-protect-nhs-save-lives/
[9] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/884002/2020-05-08_COVID-19_Press_Conference_Slides.pdf
[10] https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/the-nhs-workforce-in-numbers#2-what-is-the-overall-shortfall-in-staff-in-the-nhs
[11] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/2018/12/11/most-nhs-staff-are-loyal-public-sector-expect-serv
[12] https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/the-nhs-workforce-is-it-on-track
[13] https://abcomm.co.uk/podcasts/ (Episode 13)
[14] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/05/16/what-does-staff-engagement-mean-in-the-nhs-and-why-is-it-important/
[15] https://www.england.nhs.uk/ournhspeople/online-version/introduction/
Amanda Nash is head of communications at University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust. Prior to that she has worked in communications with the police and local government. She is a qualified and practising executive-level coach.
Twitter: @manickmanda
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/amanda-nash-b41a89136