Organisation-wide benefits of health content

How has your background shaped your work?

It’s been a wiggly route for me, which I think is quite common in health information. I started in frontline care, supporting autistic young people in a residential and respite unit. That sparked my interest in tailoring communication to meet different people’s needs.

Why did you make the switch to health communicator?

I’ve always been drawn to words and connecting with people, so I knew that ultimately I wanted to work in communications.

My current role includes different areas of focus. We are developing accessible and inclusive information to help patients at different points in their healthcare. We are supporting the organisation’s strategic objectives to create positive change for patients. And, increasingly, we are sharing our knowledge to improve communications more widely across our systems and practices.

My role is like doing a big jigsaw, with lots of pieces that need identifying and putting into place to connect up the journey for patients. I enjoy the opportunity to embed digital approaches in health information in a meaningful and transformative way.

What is the most important principle in your work?

Making sure our content resonates with people and meets their unique needs. That means capturing people’s experiences and points of view and bringing those insights into what we’re creating.

What are the biggest misconceptions you see in your work?

Helping our colleagues understand that information should be led by need. It’s very common for people to jump ahead to a solution in the form of a product, such as a film.

When this happens, it’s our job to respectfully challenge and explore what is needed more deeply. If you start by examining the challenge, you may find the solution isn’t patient information, or even communication related at all. It might be better solved with an operational change.

This clarity is especially important in an NHS environment, where we need to focus our precious resources on what will make the most positive impact.

What trends are you seeing in health communication?

There’s a significant move towards digital innovation – especially in the NHS. In my current role, we’ve embraced digital tools to improve patient engagement. For instance, our team supported the launch of a patient app that provides access to health records, empowering patients to manage their conditions better.

We’ve also made a big push from pdfs to dynamic web pages across the organisation. This sounds simple, but it’s been a major cultural change. We invested a lot of time to help people adjust. What worked was bringing it back to the human experience and sharing people’s stories to make the case for change.

The benefits are substantial: web content is more accessible, easier to navigate, and allows us to track user engagement. But even with access to those analytics, measuring the impact of health information is harder than assessing a specific call to action. So we have to be strategic and use our analytics alongside other data, such as from clinical services, to track trends and improvements.

At the same time, we don’t want to exclude people who don’t have online access. So all our webpages have a print function too, so that clinicians can hand them out as leaflets.

What’s on the horizon for you?

We’re dedicating more time to research and user involvement to deeply understand the pathways for clinical services, what patients go through and where we can improve their experience with communications or content.

There’s also immense potential in artificial intelligence. We’re exploring how we can harness AI to innovate and improve efficiencies in our work in an ethical and transparent way.

One particular challenge is how to safely and accurately translate medical information into different languages. There are about 250 different languages spoken in Lambeth alone, and we know that people who don’t speak English can be at risk of poorer health outcomes, so that’s a priority.

Among content folk there’s a general consensus that we can always do more to make things better. We have a responsibility to continue learning, testing and adapting our approaches so we continue to make a positive difference. In my view, if we can make people’s lives just a little bit easier, then we’re doing our jobs right.

1. Change what you can. You can’t influence everything, so focus on what you can do to make a difference.

2. Your voice has value. Comms people are often the most junior in the room and it’s normal to feel intimidated by louder voices. But you have unique knowledge to offer and people will be thankful for your input.

3. Honesty is a kindness. It’s ok to ask questions, respectfully challenge, not to know everything, and admit when you’ve made a mistake. There’s huge freedom in embracing imperfection!