Is comms the magic ingredient in the future NHS?

How has your background shaped your work?

I’m a Chartered Accountant by trade, but I’ve always been interested in making information work effectively. I had my introduction to healthcare in the mid 1990s as a chief internal auditor, and again in the early 2000s, when I set up a knowledge and information management team in the new National Patient Safety Agency. We developed a system that brought together adverse incident reporting (and the learning from those reports) across the NHS.

By now fascinated by healthcare, I moved into solution design and development for a global IT company, then into global healthcare strategy, and finally a role running strategy and solutions for its mobile healthcare and life sciences division, before setting up on my own.

What do you do now?

I’d describe myself as a strategist, informatician and business architect, with a particular interest in digital solutions and structures to help health and charity organisations run more effectively.

I take on consultancy projects but I also have ongoing roles in other organisations. I’ve been director of strategy for ORCHA (which reviews care and health apps) since 2017. I’m a lead advisor for MiiCare and a strategy lead for Quiddity Health. I’m also on the board of the Picker Institute and I lecture in digital health at University of Cumbria and King’s College London. Finally, I’m co-founder of a company called BidShaper, which supports health and care SMEs to successfully apply for grant funding.

It’s helpful to have that wider, strategic view to understand how everything joins together, but I can also deal with the detail. I have a niche specialism around the intersection of digital innovation and patient safety – for example, last month NHS England invited me to speak to all its patient record vendors about the patient safety risks of implementing electronic patient records.

What’s the most important function of communication in healthcare?

Without a doubt, it’s about enabling change. The comms function is essential in bringing people on that journey. There will always be some early adopters, but the rump of your audience will be ambivalent, and if they don’t see what’s in it for them, they won’t engage. Unless the communications is effective, a change programme will never get traction.

From its name, you’d think digital health was about tech, but you’d be wrong. Any innovative solution requires basic change management within the organisation, with changes to work processes, culture and mindset, and that’s very difficult. So the comms lead is pivotal to understanding the organisational culture: the sensitivities, what works, what doesn’t work, what buttons to press, things not to say. 

Implied in that is the importance of user engagement. Behavioural science techniques can only work if you understand your audience and the psychology of where they’re at. So, to engage people you need to bring them on that comms journey – hooking them in and then nudging them all the way to the call to action.

Comms people are very intentional about who something is aimed at, what they want them to do with it, and what should happen next. 

What trends are you seeing that impact on health communication?

There’s a growing awareness of the low levels of health literacy. So there’s a big push to find ways to get information to people in a way that they can digest. There’s also a drive to be as socially aware and inclusive as possible, so reducing health inequalities and improving access to information. 

Then there are big changes in how people are accessing information. People are increasingly using TikTok and Reels to get their information.

So we have to design the information people want if we don’t want to lose them.

What’s the biggest misconception you see in the health sector?

That a risk-averse culture is appropriate for all areas of work. Many health organisations won’t do anything unless there’s clear evidence showing that it’s worth doing and safe to do. 

This reflects the seriousness of their work: if you use the wrong piece of equipment in a heart transplant, there’s no going back. But it’s very different to the ‘move fast and break things’ culture often needed for creative processes, such as when developing tech. It means that even in functions that have nothing to do with clinical care, there are efforts to avoid any risk, which means things move very slowly. 

This isn’t just an issue for health – it’s also seen in other safety-critical industries. It can stifle creativity and innovation and it means often communications advice is discarded. 

What’s on the horizon for you?

There’s a host of opportunities for digital transformation in healthcare at the moment. But for a digital solution to be effective, it needs to be embedded in existing processes. And because local people don’t have time to think through how the new system will fit around the existing workflow, the solutions just get bolted on to existing ways of working. 

So when it comes to adopting an innovation, you need to start quickly, go for the easy messages, demonstrate visible success, and then spin that for all it’s worth. And the people that help you do that are the comms people.

Three tips from Clive:

1. Use consistent messaging. Find the ideas that resonate and use them all the way through your programme of work.

2. Be very, very focused. Keep messages simple and don’t ask people to understand too many different things at once.

3. Be relevant. If you need to reach multiple audiences, create multiple outputs. The language, the tone and arguments will differ for each group.

1497 1747 Articulate Health
Share this with your network: